50C!

:
No. 714 .... U23 28 May 1999
AP
China:
Harrity/U.S. News & World Report
Fight Capitalist Restoration!
For Workers Political Revolution!
We print below in edited form the first
part of a presentation by Spartaeist
League Central Committee member Ray
Bishop at an SL forum in Chicago on
May 15.
In the past year, just about every
major newspaper has had articles about
the approach on June 4 of the tenth anni-
versary of the Tiananmen massacre-
the Chinese government's bloody crack-
down on mass protests. Beginning with
students but increasingly drawing in
workers chafing under the impact of pro-
capitalist "market reforms," this upheaval
Beijing bureaucracy's drive toward capitatist restoration has created massive
unemployment, deepening poverty. In April visit, Chinese premier Zhu
Rongji sought entry into Imperialist-dominated World Trade Organization.
threatened the rule of the Beijing regime.
The mass outpouring of defiance her-
alded the beginnings of a proletarian
political revolution which would have
swept away the corrupt and despised Sta-
linist bureaucracy in Beijing.
Western bourgeois propaganda has
falsely portrayed these protests as out-
bursts of anti-Communism and of fer-
vor for Western-style "democracy:' And
the imperialists were hoping that the
anniversary would be marked by anti-
Communist protests. As you've seen on
TV, there certainly have been protests
recently-four straight days of students
and working people coming out in Bei-
jing, throwing rocks at the U.S. embassy
and shouting, "Down with U.S. imperial-
ism!" Not quite what the U.S. had bar-
gained for.
Now, we're not in a position to know,
so we can't tell you if the American
bombing of the Chinese embass}' in Bel-
grade, which is what these people were
demonstrating about, was a deliberate
continued on page 6
Defeat U. S. ImRerialism Through Workers Revolution!
Down With U.S./NAJO Jerror War
Against Serbia!
MAY 25-ln a step toward a possible
ground invasion, the Clinton adminis-
tration last week pressed its European
partners to almost double the U.S.! .
NATO military force on Serbia's bor-
ders to a total of 50,000 troops. At the
same time, NATO has stepped up the
massive bombing campaign against
Serbia, which has killed over 1,300
civilians and is destroying the entire
7

infrastructure of the country-factories
and office buildings, roads and trans-
portation netwOI:ks, water and power
distribution systems. Despite NATO's
ritual "regrets" about "collateral dam-
age"-Pentagon-speak for murder of
.civilians-the imperialists -no longer
even seek to obscure the indisputable
fact that the whole aim of the onslaught
is to inflict mass terror against the Serb
population.
Yesterday, NATO planes again
attacked electrical transformers through-
out Serbia, knocking out power supplies
_ and water pumping stations. With Bel-
grade's water reserves already reduced
continued on page 10
AP
Belgrade hospital destroyed by U.S./NATO terror bombing, May 20, killing
four people.
As New Shipyard Strike Breaks Out in Mississippi
sion in how the USWA International tops
have been dispensing the meager strike
benefits has led to growing bitterness,
One grim-faced striker told WV, "The
company is playing with us and the union
is playing with us."
Newport News: Shut It Down Tight!
A strike depends on the strength of the
workers; it is won or lost on the picket
lines. That means solid, mass picket lines
outside all the gates which no one dares
cross, drawing on the thousands of Tide-
water unionists, from !LA longshoremen
to Teamsters. This can be dqne if the
union makes it clear that it is fighting a
battle on behalf of all working people in
the area-against the "right-to-work"
laws, against the "open shop" and also
against racist discrimination on and off
the job. Newport News management is
itself notorious for its racist practices,
like discriminatory "merit pay raises"
and playing favorites for promotions and
apprentice programs .
MAY 24-Newport News Shipbuilding
and United Steelworkers (USWA) Local
8888 are meeting today for the first time
since the strike agaiIrst this major military
contractor in the Virginia Tidewater area
began almost two months ago. But the
company has continued to hardline it
against the union's demands for higher
wages and improved pensions and medi-
cal benefits. The strikers remain deter-
mined, but their battle against the racist,
profit-bloated Newport News manage-
ment has been seriously undermined by
. the union tops, leading to a number of
hourly workers scabbing.
Last week, over 7,000 shipyard work-
ers also went out in a strike against
Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mis-
sissippi, which is owned by Litton Indus-
tries and is the largest private employer in
that state. Worker protests are also contin-
uing at Louisiana's Avondale shipyard,
where the union is fighting for its first
contract. Since Litton wants to buyout
both Newport News and Avondale to be-
come the largest shipbuilder in the U.S.,
the Newport News strike will have a
major impact on these labor struggles.
In fact, the Newport News strike poses
a battle against the entire racist, "open
shop" edifice of the South, where en-
trenched racist oppression of black work-
ers is used to prevent unionization and
drive down the living standards of all
workers. Until a few years ago, many
white workers at Newport News were not
in the union. A black union committee-
woman told a Workers Vanguard team
how one white worker explained to her:
"White guys didn't join the union be-
cause it was mostly blacks in it. But then
the situation got bad, so the only way to
protect themselves was to join the union."
A victory in this strike could pave the
way for union organizing throughout the
South and strike a blow against racial
oppression, the cornerstone of American
capitalist exploitation of the entire work-
ing class. But instead of seeking to
mobilize workers from throughout the
region-including the ranks of the inte-
grated unions-to join the Newport
The Stalinist Bureaucracy and
Capitalist Counterrevolution
The Chinese bureaucracy's open drive
toward capitalist restoration threatens the
working masses with a level of devastation
and mi.sery that may well surpass what has
befallen the working people of the former
Soviet Union in the aftermath of counterrev-
olution there. In 1937, Bolshevik leader
Leon Trotsky insisted that despite the crimes
TROTSKY of the Stalin regime, the USSR remained a LENIN
workers state-albeit degenerated-as long
as it was based on collectivized property. At the same time, he warned that unless the
bureaucracy was overthrown through proletarian political revolution, its continued
rule would necessarily lead to the final undoing of the gains of the October Revolution.
If the workers' state loses its bureaucratization and gradually falls away, this means
that its development marches along the road of socialism. On the contrary, if the
bureaucracy becomes ever more powerful, authoritative, privileged, and conservative,
this means that in the workers' state the bourgeois tendencies grow at the expense of the
socialist; in other words, that inner contradiction which to a certain degree is lodged in
the workers' state from the first days of its rise does not diminish, as the "norm"
demands, but increases. However, so long as that contradiction has not passed from the
sphere of distribution into the sphere of production, and has not blown up nationalized
property and planned economy, the state remains a workers' state ....
This degeneration, as the present orgy of Bonapartist terror shows, has approached a
crucial point. That which was a "bureaucratic deformation" is at the present moment
preparing to devour the workers' state, without leaving any remains, and on the ruins of
nationalized property to spawn a new propertied class. Such a possibility has drawn
extremely near. But all this is only a possibility and we do not intend beforehand to
bow before it.. ..
The recognition of the USSR as a workers' state-not a type but a mutilation of a
type-does not at all signify a political amnesty for the Soviet bureauc-
racy. On the contrary, its reactionary character is fully revealed only in the light of the
contradiction between its antiproletarian politics and the needs of the workers' state.
Only by posing the question iii this manner does our exposure of the crimes of the Sta-
linist clique gain full motive force. The defense of the USSR means not only the
supreme struggle against imperialism, but a preparation for the overthrow of the Bona-
partist bureaucracy.
2
-Leon Trotsky, "Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?" (November 1937)

EDITOR: Len Meyers
EDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob Zorn
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan Fuller
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Mara Cadiz
EDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Helene Brosius, George Foster,
Liz Gordon, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer
The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist) .
Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly, except skipping three alternate issues in June, July and
August (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the Spartacist Pub-
lishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861
(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:vanguard@tiac.net
Domestic subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address
changes to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.
Opinions expressed in signed allicles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.
The closing date for news in this issue is May 25.
No. 714 28 May 1999
News picket lines, the pro-capitalist
USWA International bureaucracy has
pushed reliance on capitalist politicians
and the agencies of the capitalist govern-
ment, from lobbying Congress at a rally
in Washington, D.C. last month to recent
appeals for intervention by the National
Labor Relations Board.
It is significant that in the midst of the
U.S. capitalist rulers' war against Serbia,
16,000 shipyard workers in Virginia and
Mississippi are striking two major mili-
tary contractors. As we have warned
throughout the Newport News strike,
flag-waving appeals by the Steelworkers
union tops for support from capitalist pol-
iticians based on the "national interest"
and "national defense" will backfire
when the capitalists use the war as an
excuse to break the strike. In ordering the
Newport News talks, a spokesman for the
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Ser-
vice stated that the strike has "national
defense implications" and that the navy
"needs their boats back."
The way that this strike will be won is
with mass picket lines that stop all scab-
bing. Although the workers who are out
remain dedicated to the strike, shipyard
gates have stayed open throughout the
strike and the lines are becoming smaller
because of the bureaucrats' treachery.
Emboldened cops are intimidating pick-
ets and laughing about their "stick time in
'79," when they rampaged against picket-
ers during the three-month strike that
established Local 8888. Hundreds upon
hundreds of strikers stand in lines at the
Freemarket Mall three miles away, seek-
ing promised union financial assistance,
while only 20 strikers-and in some
cases as few as three-man the picket
lines at the gates. The chaos and confu-
Union tops refuse to
build mass pickets to
shut down shipyard.
Meanwhile, miles
away strikers stand in
long lines for meager
strike assistance
from the union.
The experience of WV sales teams in
the area demonstrated the
potential for mobilizing other sections of
unionized workers: UPS Teamsters, ILA
longshoremen and workers at the nearby
Norshipco shipyard snapped up copies of
WV covering the Newport News strike. A
black Newport News bus driver in the
Amalgamated Transit Union immediately
bought WV and told us that bus drivers
were tooting their horns as they passed
the picket lines to support the strikers.
The bus company ordered a halt to such
displays of solidarity at the demand of
Newport News management. One woman
bus driver reportedly slammed the door in
a scab's face rather than allow such ver-
min on the bus.
But mobilizing the power of the multi-
racial working class is sabotaged by
the AFL-CIO misleaders who bind the
unions to the racist, capitalist Democratic
Party. What's needed is a political fight
inside the unions to oust the pro-capitalist
bureaucracy and replace it with a class-
struggle leadership-one which recog-
nizes that the interests of labor are coun-
terposed to those of the employers. For a
workers party that fights for a workers
government!
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY
National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 7-32-7860
Boston
Box 390840, Central Sta.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 666-9453
Chicago
Box 6441, Main PO
Chicago, IL 60680
(312) 454-4930
Los Angeles
Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta.
. Los Angeles, CA 90029
(213) 380-8239
New York
Box 3381, Church St. Sta.
New York. NY 10008
(212) 267-1025
Oakland
Box 29497
Oakland, CA 94604
(510) 839-0851
San Francisco
Box 77494
:San Francisco, CA 94107
. (415) 777-9367
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA/LiGUE TROTSKYSTE DU CANADA
Toronto
Box 7198, Station A
Toronto:ON M5W 1X8
(416) 593-4138
Vancouver
Box 2717, Main P.O.
Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2
(604) 687-0353
WORKERS VANGUARD
German Spartacists Detained by Berlin Cops
University in Mexico City, which has
been rocked by militant protests against
the imposition of tuition. In Japan, at a
50,OOO-strong protest against revisions to
the Japan-U.S. security treaty on May
22, metal workers, medical workers and
rail workers reached into their pockets to
give to the campaign-as did youth sup-
porters of the Communist Party, despite
their leaders' attempts to exclude and
silence us. And students from the Chi-
nese deformed workers state studying in
the U.S., Canada and Australia have
donated to the fund drive, including at
protests against NATO's bombing of tfie
Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
24 MAY-Following the U.S.lNATO
bombing of the Zastava car factory in
Kragujevac, Yugoslavia on April 9, work-
ers at the Alfa Romeo plant in Milano,
Italy downed tools in protest and the Alfa
Romeo COBAS (Rank-and-File Commit-
tee) launched a fund drive for Yugoslav
workers. Strikes and workers demonstra-
tions against the war have been steadily
escalating in Italy, now ruled by the coali-
tion government headed by Prime Min-
ister Massimo D' Alema's Party of the
Democratic Left. On May 13, COBAS
led a political general strike around
the slogan "Not a life, not a lira for this
war!"
Sections of the International Commu-
nist League around the world have actively
joined in the COBAS-initiated campaign
of material aid, which aims to raise a bil-
lion lire (some $5.60,000) for the workers
of Zastava and other factories. Despite
our political differences with many of the
participants in this campaign, including
the syndicalist-influenced COBAS, the
ICL has participated in the spirit of
the united front-march separately, strike
together! In doing so, we have been able
to make the fund drive an international
effort, providing a way for workers
throughout the world to express class sol-
idarity with Yugoslav workers and oppo-
sition to the death and destruction that the
U.S.INATO imperialists have been rain-
ing down on the people of Serbia for two
months now. Indeed, the imperialists'
murderous attack on the Zastava plant-
killing tens of workers, injuring scores
and putting tens of thousands out of work
. -epitomizes the nature of the U.S.!
NATO war, which is clearly aimed at ter-
rorizing the Serbian population.
German imperialism, which instigated
the counterrevolutionary breakup of the
Yugoslav deformed workers state, is now
engaged in its first direct military combat
since the defeat of the Nazi regime. The
coalition government headed by Social
Democratic (SPD) chancellor Gerhard
SchrOder has sought to quell growing
popular opposition to the war against
Serbia, which suffered under Nazi occu-
pation during World War II. On May 18,
police detained two Spartakist salesmen
in front of a Berlin Daimler-Chrysler
plant to stop them from collecting for the
fund drive. As described in a May 24
protest statement by our comrades of the
Spartakist Workers Party (SpAD):
"Our supporters were packed into a
police van and held against their will for
45 minutes while astonished Mercedes
workers and apprentices streamed out of
the factory gate. Worker donations col-
lected before the cops arrived were
immediately confiscated along with the
collection bucket under the pretext of
'suspicion of fraud.' At the same time, of
course, thousands of buckets are being
passed for the Kosovo refugees, and that
is allowed because it enhances the pre-
text for this murderous war (while the
borders of racist Germany remain tightly
shut to the refugees). This attack by the
SPD-led German capitalist state on
basic working-class solidarity is meant to
intimidate and regiment all workers who
dare to demonstrate their opposition to
the war of u.s. and German imperialism
in the Balkans and must be vigorously
fought ....
"It is not an accident that the police were
apparently called by the Werkschutz
[company cops] of Daimler, which as
arms manufacturer and pillar of both the
Third and Fourth Reichs of German
imperialism has its strategic interests in
the Balkans, too."
The SpAD statement pointed to the
Zastava workers' history of class strug-
gle, including a bitter strike two and a
half years ago against the bourgeois-
nationalist Milosevic regime, which had
fired more than half of the workforce in
28 MAY 1999
Zastava auto plant
following U.S./NATO
terror bombing on
April 9.' Below:
Spartakist Workers
Party comrades collect
donations at Berlin's
Humboldt University
in fund drive for
Yugoslav workers.
Spartakist
the wake of capitalist restoration. The
statement declared that the "murderous
act of NATO terror against them-like
the bombing of other key factories that
have so far destroyed the workplaces of
a half million workers-was intended as
a warning to the proletariat throughout
the Balkans."
In the imperialist "belly of the beast"
in the U.S., our comrades have collected
funds from trade unionists outside work-
places and union meetings, including
among the heavily black and immigrant
New York City transit workforce. In Brit-
ain, where Tony Blair's Labour govern-
ment has distinguished itself as the most
no credit
bellicose of the NATO powers, shop
stewards from the Cowley car plant,
workers at Ford Dagenham near London
and London Underground transit workers
have contributed. So, too, have immi-
grant workers-in Britain and elsewhere
in Europe-who are on the receiving end
of racist state repression and the fascist
terror it spawns and have not bought into
the cynical "humanitarian" pretext for
NATO's Balkans war.
In Mexico, subjected to U.S. imperial-
ist plunder, the Grupo Espartaquista was
invited to address and pass the hat-
among 600 delegates of the workers
committee at the National Autonomous
While anger and revulsion against the
NATO slaughter is widespread, the capit-
ulation of an array of so-called "social-
ist" outfits to their "own" bourgeoisies,
presently served by social-democratic
governments in many cases, is appar-
ently without limit. The British Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) of Tony Cliff and
its international cothinkers are a case in
point. When our comrades of the Sparta-
cist LeaguelBritain first collected for the
fund drive at a May 8 London antiwar
protest, a number of SWPers contributed.
But the SWP leadership soon brought a
halt to this. At a subsequent protest on
May 18, SWP spokesman Julie Waterson
became so rabid in trying to thwart the
efforts of our comrades that she grabbed
a big handful of leaflets out of a collec-
tion bucket.
Our participation in the campaign for
aid to the workers under NATO's guns
necessarily entails a political struggle
against the reformists and centrists who
have given aid and comfort to their
respective bourgeoisies. As Leninists, we
understand that opposition to imperialism
abroad means class struggle at home-
that socialist revolution, requiring the
instrumentality of a revolutionary party to
lead it, is the only way to put an end to the
capitalist system which breeds war.
We urge our readers to donate gen-
erously to the Zastavacampaign-
truly a cause in the interest of the
whole of the working people. Contri-
butions can be made out to the Parti-
san Defense Committee (earmarked
"For Yugoslav Workers") and sent to:
Partisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box
99, Canal Street Station, New York,
NY 10013.
LO Covers for Imperialism's War in the Balkans
Protest LO Gangsterism Against leL Trotskyists!
We print below a protest statement
issued on May 25 by our comrades of
the Ligue Trotskyste de France.
. This year's Lutte Ouvriere (LO) fete
concluded on 24 'May with a violent
physical assault. Around 6:30 p.m., a
20-man goon squad decked out in
leather jackets, black leather gloves and
Lutte Ouvriere security squad armbands
surrounded International Communist
League comrades engaged in political
discussion. Our comrades were grabbed
by the throat and choked, jumped and
brutally dragged out of the fete while
being punched by this gang of thugs.
Our comrade Xavier Brunoy, editor of
our French paper Le Bolchevik, was
seized and his arm deliberately broken in
four places by a leading LO gangster.
He was taken from the scene by
lance and required surgery. ICL com-
rades quickly regrouped and went back
to the many shocked witnesses to mobi-
lize political opposition to this atrocity.
Violence is the recourse of political
cowards. Unable to defend its political
support to the capitalist Jospin/Gayssot
government-a government of imperi-
alist war in the Balkans, racist deporta-
tions and strikebreaking on the domes-
tic front-LO substituted the fist for
the brain as an "answer" to the revolu-
, tionary program of the ICL.
The immediate precedent to LO's
violent assault was the ICL's exposure
of LO's social-chauvinist support to its
own ruling class in the Balkans war.
Aping the ruling PSIPCF [Socialist
Party/Communist Party] government,
which has of course quashed antiwar
demonstrations while they bomb Serbia
back to the Stone Age, LO too tried to
conduct a "Marxist" fete while ignoring
that a war is going on! At the LO-LCR
[Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire]
debate, no discussion on the war by the
public or even LO members was
allowed. Finally, the troublesome topic
was opened for discussion only on the
final day, in the final forum, when most
participants had already left. Despite a
veneer of opposition to the bombing,
LO joins in the imperialists' war cry
over "poor little Kosovo" whiCh is the
pretext for a terror war against the
Yugoslav people and for moving in a
massive imperialist army of ground
troops disguised as "peacekeepers."
In sharp counterposition to LO, ICL
comrades motivated the attitude of
proletarian revolutionary international-
ists: Defeat imperialism through work-
ers revolution! Defend Serbia against
imperialist attack! At this time, the right
of independence for Kosovo is neces-
sarily subordinated to the fight against
NATO imperialism. Against the social-
chauvinism and opportunism of LO and
the LCR, ICL comrades argued that you
can't fight imperialist war without fight-
ing for socialist revolution to overturn
the capitalist system which breeds war.
LO-LCR's accommodation to the capi-
talist order is seen in the LCR's explicit
call for ground troops to the Balkans
and in the platform of the LO-LCR slate
for the European Parliament, which
doesn't even mention the word "social-
ism." With "Euro-Socialists" like LO-
LCR, who needs the stinking corpse of
social democracy which currently rules
most of capitalist Europe!
LO is in trouble, and no amount of
gangsterism can cover up its political
crisis. Recent polls predict the LO-LCR
slate won't muster the necessary votes
to make it into the European Parlia-
ment. For a group which has given up
on proletarian revolution in favor of
bourgeois parliamentarism, including
feeding at the financial trough of the
bourgeois state, electoral defeat spells
disaster. Thus LO is even fur-
ther to the right in a desperate scramble
for votes. LO has stooped to the cam-
paign style of American bourgeois
politicians, trashing even the pretense
to political program, hustling caps and
T-shirts with no message except "Vote
LO-LCR."
continued on page 10
3
We reprint the following letter as we
received it via the'lnternet.
7 May 1999
Dear Editor,
Your hit piece hypocritically titled
"Mobilize the Power of Labor! Free
Mumia Now!" (WV 16 April, 1999) in
anticipation of the powerful April 24
West Coast longshore workers' shutdown
in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal reflects
a continuing political degeneration of the
Spartacist League, exemplified by your
abstention from and open hostility to
class struggle. The International Long-
shore and Warehouse Union (ILWU),
despite opposition from reactionary ele-
ments, took this action in order to mobi-
lize our membership for the April 24
demonstration for Mumia in San Fran-
cisco. Your sectarian opposition to the
April 24 Mumia mobilization was based
on the grounds that one of its demands
was for a new trial. The ILWU and other
union contingents carried banners calling
for freedom for Mumia, implementing
the united front slogim: "March sepa-
rately, strike together".
April 24 was the most significant step
to date in the struggle to free Mumia, not
so much because it was the largest dem-
onstration, but because longshore work-
ers utilized their power to shutdown all
ports on the West Coast to demand 1)
Stop the Execution and 2) Free Mumia!
Our union resolution specifically states
that Mumia can't get a fair trial and
demands his freedom. Yet, WV inten-
tionally tries to obfuscate this point by
simply disappearing it and minimizes the
impact of our work stoppage by falsely
reporting it as only two hours. WV must
have confused the "two hours" with the
work stoppage of the teachers' union in
the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on
April 23. Both labor actions called for
. freedom for Mumia and both actions
were the result of resolutions presented
by critics of your tendency, the Interna-
tional Communist League, ergo your
jaundiced reporting.
To not participate now in the April
24 protest in defense of self-proclaimed
revolutionary and former Black Panther
Mumia Abu-Jamal, for whom the Par-
tisan Defense Committee had done
important, early groundbreaking defense
work, is to abstain from the class strug-
gle at a critical time. If Philadelphia
,. Replies
J
ack Heyman's letter, like the letter
from the International Bolshevik-
Tendency (ffiT) and the polemic by
the Internationalist Group (IG) in the
April-May issue of its 11Jternationalist
(see page 5), is intended to cover for the
class-collaborationist character of the
April 24 "Millions for Mumia" demon-'
stration he supported and built. Our atti-
tude toward that mobilization was in-
formed by the same criteria on which we
have based our years-long efforts to free
Mumia. We have stressed that the fight
to save the life of this outspoken black
journalist, MOVE supporter and former
Black Panther Party spokesman is part
and parcel of the struggle to abolish the
racist death penalty. We have sought to
win workers to the understanding that
the bourgeois state, with its cops and
courts, is not some "neutral" agency
which serves society as a whole but
rather exists to defend the class rule and
profits of the capitalists against those
they exploit. We have aimed at infusing
the multiracial proletariat with the con-
sciousness that the fight against black
oppression is central to the struggle for
the emancipation of labor itself.
From the time the Spartacist League
and Partisan Defense Committee first
took up Jamal's cause 12 years ago, we
have fought for a class-struggle defense
strategy centered on mobilizing the
social power of the integrated labor
movement, requiring its political inde-
4
Labor Opportunism,
the Democratic Party
and the Defense
of Mumia Abu-Jamal
longshoremen were to raise a resolution
in their union demanding a new trial
and shutting down the port to send
a strong message to Governor Ridge,
the logical extension of the SL's posi-
tion would be to oppose such a motion
for bold labor action because it held
illusions in the state. Union militants
would warn against illusions of justice
in the capitalist courts while critically
supporting the motion and trying to
build mass mobilizations and spreading
that class struggle action to other sec-
tions of the working class, especially the
heavily black transportation unions in
Philadelphia.
Larry Wright and I, both ILWU Local
10 stewards and organizers of the 1984
San Francisco longshore anti-apartheid
action, participated in the March 6 Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley Confer-
ence to build for the April 24 mobiliza-
tion. In the first labor workshop at the
end of the panelists' presentations, as
chair, I asked those who wanted to speak
to identify themselves, their union or
organization and what they or their sup-
porters had done in the unions to defend
Mumia. One SL supporter said he had
helped raise money in his union for
Mumia's legal defense. Later, another SL
supporter made a hypocritical speech
calling on longshoremen to shutdown the
Coast, but didn't say what action SL sup-
porters in their transportation unions had
pendence from the capitalist parties. We
have publicized Jamal's cause, raised
critically important funds for his legal
battles and fought to mobilize the broad-
est range of social forces in his defense.
We recognized from the outset that
larger forces than our own would have to
be brought into the struggle to free
Jamal .. And largely as a result of our
efforts, larger numbers of liberals and
reformists did finally get involved when
Mumia was threatened with execution in
the summer of 1995. But we also knew
that these other forces would be far
removed from our Marxist perspective.
The April 24 demonstrations were
dedicated to something we support-the
defense of Jamal-but with slogans con-
sciously formulated to spell out some-
thing we don't support: the notion that
Jamal will get justice in a capitalist
society. With the central focus the call
for a new trial, the demonstrations were
aimed at a bloc with the liberal Demo-
crats who want ~ t o clean up the more
grotesque and embarrassing aspects of
the frame-up trial. They were politically
organized along the lines of a classic
popular front-a class-collaborationist
bloc in which the working class is subor-
dinated to the program of a wing of the
capitalist ruling class, represented by the
Democratic Party.
The social power of the integrated
longshore union lies in the ability to shut
down the docks, stop the movement of
goods and thereby halt the flow of capi-
talist profit. Although undermined by
called for. It would be gratifying to know
that they fought for work stoppages in
defense of Mumia, but, alas, their silence
speaks loudly.
During the 1984 longshore anti-
apartheid action the SL at first refused to
support it, then in the midst of the II day
action switched their position to critical
support without publicly acknowledging
their change. Both Larry Wright and I
(amongst others) organized in 1984 to
defy the injunction against the anti-
apartheid action and had for several years
been organizing longshore workers-
through the Stewards' Council, the Exec-
utive Board, international dockers confer-
ences, membership meetings and finally
at the '99 Longshore Caucus for labor
action to defend Mumia. The coastwise
shutdown to free Mumia didn't just fall
from the sky. To organize a successful
workers' struggle the sense of isolation
must be eliminated and the spirit of soli-
darity reinforced. That is why I requested
in the January 22, 1999 letter from
the Rank and File ILWU Committee
to Defend Mumia Abu-Jamal to the SL-
initiated Partisan Defense Committee,
"a list of trade unions which have sup-
ported Mumia's defense in one way
or another, endorsements, letters, resolu-
tions, donations etc." We were attempting
to organize solidarity for labor action
for Mumia, not knowing in advance the
outcome.
Heyman's treachery, the ILWU stop-
work on April 24 posed the possibility of
a major disruption of shipping that
would be a giant blow against the
capitalist frame-up system. Such a polit-
cal strike would be more effective in
the fight to free Mumia than a thou-
sand demonstrations. It would advance
the struggle of longshoremen and all
workers against the capitalist employers
and be a powerful blow for black
freedom-a cause which must be ac-
tively championed by labor as part of
the fight for workers revolution to
Your sectarian refusal was com-
pounded further by WV's absurd and
scurrilous charge that my aim was "to go
after the reds, in the service of the labor
bureaucracy". What is the name of that
leading union bureaucrat? ILWU Interna-
tional President Brian McWilliams who
spoke at the Longshore Caucus in favor
of the resolution to shutdown the Coast
for Mumia? Who is prominently pictured
in the same WV article speaking at a 1995
PDC rally to stop the execution of
Mumia? Who called for Mumia's free-
dom at the April 24 San Francisco rally?
Who, last year, gave instrumental support
to union militants organizing to shut
down Bay Area ports to fend off a legal
witchhunting attack by the employers'
association? It is instructive that again, as
in the '84 anti-apartheid action, the SL
abstained from supporting the interna-
tional solidarity picket line of labor activ-
ists for the Liverpool dockworkers in this
Neptune Jade struggle, but begrudgingly
backed our legal defense case.
With this kind of slander against class
struggle militants who have actually
organized workers to take concrete action
to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, a step toward
freeing the whole of the international
working class from the shackles of capi-
talism, the SL has descended into a
deeper, darker political abyss.
For labor action to free Mumia,
Jack Heyman
sweep away the entire racist, capitalist
system in which black oppression is
rooted.
When the workers at UPS and GM
went on strike, the withdrawal of their
labor economically paralyzed two of the
biggest corporations in the U.S., costing
them billions in lost profits. These are
examples-albeit expressed solely on the
economic plane--of what we mean by
the social power of labor, when we call
to "Mobilize the Power of Labor! Free
Mumia Now!" To be really effective, a
political strike must be conducted with
WVPhoto
San Francisco: PDe and Spartacist League intervened with Class-struggle
program against pro-Democratic Party reformism at April 24 "Millions for
Mumia" rallies.
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ILWU presence at April 24 rally was labor fac;ade for class-collaborationist
appeals to Democratic Party. ILWU Local 10 bureaucrat Jack Heyman, joined
by longtime IBT supporter, explicitly endorsed call for "new trial," sowing
illusions in racist capitalist courts.
complete independence from the bour-
geoisie and all its institutions.
Window Dressing for
Class Collaboration
Heyman worked on two levels inside
and outside the ILWU to create the illu-
sion that this Democratic Party-centered
rally was a "labor mobilization" to defend
Mumia. As an exec board member of S.P.
longshore Local 10, he helped create the
impression that the ILWU was engaging
in a political strike to shut down the West
Coast ports, when in fact what was done
was to shift the regular monthly union
meetings to coincide with April 24, tout-
ing these as "work stoppages." Outside
the. union, he worked with the IBT, with
whom he has a long association, to set up
a fake organization called the "Labor
Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-
Jamal" (LAC), whose purpose was to pre-
tend that they were the coordinators of
"labor support" to the April 24 demon-
stration. As we wrote in our article, the
LAC "obscures the class nature of the
capitalist state, deep-sixes any mention of
the Democratic Party and completely
obviates the centrality of the fight for
black liberation to the cause of the eman-
cipation of all of labor" ("No Illusions in
Capitalist Courts! Mobilize the Power of
Labor! Free Mumia Now!" WV No. 711,
16 April).
It is a measure of the fundamental dis-
honesty of Jack Heyman and the centrist
IG of Jan Norden that in nearly identical
language they both blatantly attempt to
deny what every endorser and most par-
ticipants knew: that the explicit basis for
the April 24 mobilizations was the call for
a "new trial." Apparently assuming no
one will bother to read union resolutions,
Heyman writes: "Our union resolution
specifically states that Mumia can't get a
fair trial and demands his freedom." Sim-
ilarly, his apologists in the International-
ist write of the ILWU action, "An una-
ware reader would deduce that the action
or its initiators are calling for a new trial.
Not so." Thus, these people attempt to
conceal the simple' fact that, like similar
motions passed by dozens of other unions,
the ILWU resolution endorsed the April 24
rally and its call for a new trial. Here is
what the main part of the resolution actu-
ally says, including the key sections omit-
28 MAY 1999
ted by Heyman, the IG and the IBT:
"WHEREAS: On April 24, 1999, there
will be national demonstrations to de-
mand a stop to the execution of and a
new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal--on the
East Coast in Philadelphia and on the
West Coast in San Francisco, as wel1 as
international demonstrations; and
"WHEREAS: The organized labor move-
ment has the power through action to en-
sure justice for this principled and coura-
geous freedom fighter, which he can't
get in the courts; THEREFORE BE IT
"RESOLVED: That the ILWU go on
record to:
"I) Support the San Francisco demon-
stration and mobilize our membership on
the coast to participate by coordinating
our April stop-work meetings for the
24th to demand: 'Stop the Execution!
Free Mumia!'"
So Jack Heyman and his lawyer Jan
Norden "disappear" the first WHEREAS
above, the ILWU's endorsement of the
call for a new trial, in their clumsy
attempts to provide l! cover for the pro-
Democratic Party labor bureaucracy.
Heyman shamelessly continues his cha-
rade, declaring: "Union militants would
warn against illusions of justice in the
capitalist courts while critically support-
ing" a hypothetical motion calling for a
new trial in the Philadelphia longshore
union. What Heyman doesn't say is that
he was the author of just such a motion,
in which he included as window dressing
the counterposed statement that Mumia
cannot get justice in the bourgeois courts.
We learned of Heyman's central role in
this bit of deception from the letter by his
friends in the IBT, who inform us that the
ILWU motion "had been initiated by Jack
Heyman, a former SL supporter."
The complete text of the ILWU resolu-
tion authored by Heyman is contained in
a bulletin-type brochure published by the
LAC, along with copies of other union
resolutions endorsing the call for a new
trial. At the end of this collection of res-
olutions, the LAC conveniently prints a
"partial list" of "Labor Organizations
Calling for a New Trial for Mumia Abu-
Jamal" which includes 83 national and
international union endorsers an.d 74
"individual labor endorsements" for April
24. At the top of the list-no surprise
whatsoever-is the ILWU. Among the
individual endorsers of the call for a new
trial we find ... Jack Heyman and longtime
continued on page 8
We publish below excerpts from an
article headlined "WV Blames Victims,
Distorts April 24 Shutdown for Mumia"
in the Internationalist Group's Interna-
tionalist (April-May 1999).
... The SL is in fact pursuing a com-
pletely unprincipled vendetta. This is
underscored by its response to the
ILWU's decision to shut down all West
Coast ports on April 24 to demand free-
dom for Mumia Abu-Jamal-the first
such political work stoppage in the U.S.
in defense of Jamal (see article in this
issue). In a lpng back-page article titled
"Mobilize the Power of Labor! Free
Mumia Now!" Workers Vanguard" No.
711 (16 April 1999) makes a passing ref-
erence to the work stoppage, grudgingly
admitting that "to pull the thousands
of longshoremen coastwide off the job,
even if only for a few hours, would
be a powerful statement of the social
power that can and must be mobilized
in broader actions-from mass labor-
centered protests to political strikes-for
Jamal's freedom."".
Meanwhile, the WV article willfully
misrepresents the ILWU action. It focuses
on denouncing calls by Workers World,
Socialist Action and others for a "new
trial." There can be no "fair trial" for
Mumia in the racist capitalist courts that
have relentlessly hounded black radicals
and him in particular. We demand that
Mumia be freed, now! In the middle of its
article, WV charges the initiators of the
ILWU work stoppage with "concealing
. the true nature of the capitalist state." An
unaware reader would deduce that the
action or its initiators are calling for a
new trial. Not so. WV deliberately omits
the fact that the motion voted by the del-
egates to the union's Longshore Caucus
on March 26 does not call for a new
trial-in fact it states that "the organized
labor movement has the power through
action to ensure justice for this principled
and courageous freedom fighter, which
he can't get in the courts." And the ILWU
work stoppage is explicitly to demand
"Stop the Execution! Free Mumia!"
The WV article never cites that motion
and never explains how the ILWU work
stoppage came about. Moreover, it misin-
forms its readers that the action consists
of "two-hour stop work
the union has officially called for shutting
down work on all ships "from 8:00 a.m.
to 6:00 p.m. from Bellingham, Wash. to
San Diego, Calif." as spelled out. in the
ILWU newspaper (The Dispatcher,
March 1999). So WV cynically misrepre-
sents both the demands and the nature of
the union action for Mumia, and it uses
the classic technique of the amalgam to
carry out this lying sleight-of-hand ....
The WV article goes so far as to charge
ILWU Local 10 executive board member
Jack Heyman, who presented the motion
for the stoppage which was approved by
the local and the Coast Caucus, with
seeking to "go after the reds"! What is the
evidence for this outrageous charge of
witchhunting? That Heyman asked the
Partisan Defense Committee (the defense
organization associated with the Sparta-
cist League, which has played a very
important role in Mumia's defense for
over 12 years) for help in putting together
a list of uniorts and labor offiCials who
have publicly come out in Mumia's
defense ....
There is a connection here. The SL
and International Communist League
(ICL) have regularly solicited Heyman in
the past for endorsement of various dem-
onstrations. But while not a supporter of
the IGILFI, Heyman won union support
(from the ILWU and International Dock-
ers' Conference) for the Brazilian Trot-
skyist workers facing bourgeois state
repression. And he had the gumption to
speak out against the ICL's betrayal of
the struggle by the LQB to expel cops
from the unions in Brazil.. ..
* * *
The following excerpts are from an
April 25 letter by the International Bol-.
shevik Tendency.
Comrades:
As we have occasionally pointed
out in the past, the Spartacist League/
Partisan Defense Committee (SLIPDC)
deserves credit for its pioneering work in
publicizing the case of Mumia Abu
Jamal and organizing for his freedom.
Since 1995 Mumia's case has won ever
broader support within the left and labor
movement internationally. Regrettably
you have not seen this as an opportunity
to engage in common work and political
struggle with activists from other organi-
zations. Instead you have tended to allow
petty sectarian organizational considera-
tions to take precedence over principled
united-front activity to free Mumia.
The 16 April Workers Vanguard (WV)
commentary on recent events in Mumia's
defense campaign is a case in point. The
article, headlined "Mobilize the Power of
Labor! Free Mumia Now!," treats in an
extremely cursory manner the exception-
ally important work-stoppage by the
International Longshore and Warehouse
Union (ILWU) on 24 April. Every port
from San Diego to Bellingham Washing-
ton was shut down for the day in solidar-
ity with Mumia! ... You claim that it was
organized so as "!O minimize the cost to
the company," but Saturday can be one
of the busiest days on the docks. You
also mistakenly report that the work
stoppage was only for two hours, rather
than for the entire day shift.
You grudgingly admit that it was, "a
powerful statement of the social power"
of labor to win Mumia's freedom ....
You reported that "the ILWU" had
called for the action, but did not inform
your readers that it had been initiated by
Jack Heyman, a former SL supporter,
who is currently on the executive board
of the ILWU's San Francisco local, and
is also active in the Labor Action Com-
mittee to Free Mumia (LAC), along with
IBT comrades, former SL trade-union
supporters and others ....
Brother Heyman is introduced in the
WV article as someone "who postures as
the left wing of the ILWU Local IO exec-
utive Board" and roundly denounced
for having the temerity to ask the "non-
sectarian" PDC for a list of union
endorsements gathered in the past for
Mumia ....
You prefer the call to "Free Mumia!"
So do we. Nonetheless we do not see this
as a reason to abstain from participating
in national events that are many times
larger than any rallies the SLIPDC has
been able to organize ....
The ILWU contingent, which headed
the 24 April demonstration in San Fran-
cisco, raised the call to "Free Mumia!" It
did not, to my knowledge, call for a
"New Trial."
WV approvingly quoted the remarks of
a participant in an SL meeting last Febru-
ary who asked:
"How about somebody telling the truth,
that there's no way that Mumia's going
to get justice in the courts. It's going to
be exactly the same frame-up bul1shit
that happened the first time."
It is not impossible that a new trial
could result in 'an acquittal. To assert oth-
erwise is fake ultra-leftjsm. Fake, because
the SL doesn't truly believe it. If a new
trial can only result in "exactly the same
frame-up bullshit," why is the PDC's
Rachel Wolkenstein still participating in
Mumia's defense team which has been
pursuing every possible legal avenue,
including trying to win a retrial?..
Samuel T. for the
International Bolshevik Tendency
5
China ...
(continued from page 1)
provocation or not. The student-centered
demonstrations outside U.S. embassies
and consulates certainly expressed the
outrage of the Chinese people, histori-
cally oppressed by Western and Japanese
imperialism. At the same time, the Bei-
jing regime was careful to restrict these
protests. Reportedly, they banned factory
contingents for fear that the workers
might voice their own grievances against
the regime's drive toward a capitalist
market economy.
In the United States, students from
China staged their own protests. The
Spartacist League participated in these,
carrying placards in Chinese reading:
"For Workers Revolution to Defeat U.S.
Imperialism!", "Defend Serbia Against
U.S.INATO Attack!" and "For Workers
Political Revolution to Stop Capitalist
Counterrevolution in China!" Many of
the Chinese students were shocked to find
communists in the U.S.-the heartland of
world capitalism. Underlying this response
is the nationalist outlook historically fos-
tered by the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), which denied the possibility of
workers revolution in Japan and the West.
The Spartacist League fights for the
defeat of .U.S. imperialism and all the
imperialist powers raining terror on the
Serbs. We do this in the tradition of the
Bolshevik Party of V. I. Lenin and Leon
Trotsky-the party which led the multi-
national proletariat of Russia to power in
the October Revolution of 1917. We fight
for mobilizing the multiracial American
working class in socialist rt(volution. And
from that standpoint, we defend Serbia
militarily.
China on the Brink
When we talk about China, it is
from the same standpoint of communists
fighting for a socialist society-for
new October Revolutions internationally.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution led by
Mao Zedong expelled Chiang Kai-shek's
Guomindang bourgeoisie-as well as the
imperialists his regime served-from the
Chinese mainland. It created a planned
economy which laid the basis for huge
strides for workers, peasants, women and
minorities like the Tibetans. And on that
6
Declaration of Principles and
Some Elements of Program
International Communist
League (Fourth Internationalist)
Adopted in 1998 at the
Third International Conference
of the ICL.
$1 (20 pages)
Make checks payable/mall to: ,
Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377
GPO, New York, NY 10116
AP
May 8: Thousands of students in Beijing protest U.S. bombing of Chinese
embassy in Belgrade.
basis we have always, as Trotskyists,
given unconditional military defense to
China against imperialism and internal
counterrevolution.
But today Mao's heirs are pursuing a
drive toward capitalist restoration full
speed ahead which would destroy the
social gains of that revolution, which are
already in fact massively eroded. So after
20-plus years of "market reforms," the
same Guomindang bourgeoisie, the same
imperialists that were kicked out in 1949
are today exploiting workers in large
sections, and growing sections, of China.
The Communist Party regime has now
brought China to the brink. Whether the
drive toward capitalist counterrevolution
succeeds there, or whether the Chi-
nese proletariat acts to stop that disas-
ter by ousting the Stalinist bureaucracy
and imposing its own political rule, is
a centrally important question for work-
ing people and opponents of capitalist
exploitation and imperialist depredation
everywhere.
To understand what is happening in
China today, you have to understand the
nature of what happened in 1949. That
social revolution, while massively popu-
lar, was bureaucratically deformed from
its inception. Unlike the October Revolu-
tion in Russia, it was not a revolution
ICL sign in Chines4f
reads: "For Workers
Revolution to Defeat
U.S. Imperialism!
Defend Serbia
Against U.S./NATO
Attack!"
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made by the working class. Instead, it was
Mao's peasant-guerrilla army which took
power, excluding the proletariat from
political power.
China is what we call a bureaucrati-
cally defprmed workers state, akin to the
Soviet Union under Stalin, who stood at
the head of a bureaucratic caste which
rose to power there in a political counter-
revolution in 1923-24. The conservative,
nationalist outlook of both the Moscow
and Beijing bureaucracies was expressed
in the dogma of "socialism in one coun-
try"-a complete perversion of Marxism.
Socialism-the early stage of a classless
communist society-requires material
abundance. It can only be achieved
through a series of proletarian revolu-
tions, especially in the advanced indus-
trial countries. The Stalinists have al-
. ways and everywhere been virulently
opposed to the Bolshevik program of
world socialist revolution, instead seek-
ing alliances with one or another imperi-
alist bourgeoisie.
Stalinist rule blocks any development
toward a socialist society. In China today,
it means a galloping drive toward the out-
right restoration of capitalist enslavement.
What is posed in China, very urgently, is
what Trotsky called for as early as the
1930s in the Soviet Union: a proletarian
political revolution, which means replac-
ing the rule of the parasitic nationalist
bureaucracy with the rule of workers
soviets-workers councils-committed
to reviving and defending the planned
economy and committed to the interna-
tionalist principles of Leriin and Trotsky's
communism.
As Trotskyists, we militarily defended
to the last the former Soviet Union-a
degenerated workers state-and the de-
formed workers states of East Europe
based on their nationalized and planned
economies. We defended them against
capitalist counterrevolution-against the
imperialists and internal counterrevolu-
tionary forces. Our unconditional mili-
tary defense of China against imperial-
ism includes, for instance, upholding its
right to nuclear weapons. That, in short,
is our position on the brouhaha that's
still being whipped up over the supposed
theft of nuclear secrets in the Los Ala-
mos laboratory. It is the United States
which not only has the world's largest
nuclear arsenal but is the only country
ever to use it, with the incineration of
200,000 Japanese and Koreans living
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The U.S. has threatened repeatedly to
unleash nuclear terror against China, for
instance during the Korean War of 1950-
53. And even as Washington was scream-
ing bloody murder over the so-called spy
at Los Alamos, Clinton was proposing an
East Asian missile defense system which
would tie in Japan, South Korea and pos-
sibly Taiwan. That was a direct threat to
China.
Now about the stuff about missiles and
spies. Let's give an example from history.
As communists, we honor the memory
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg-heroic
people who were executed in 1953 as
Soviet "A-bomb spies." We say it was a
good thing that the USSR developed its
atom bomb, or the U.S. might well have
launched further nuclear attacks after
1945-against the Soviet Union, against
China and later against Vietnam and
Cuba. Despite the nationalist, concilia-
tionist policies of the Stalinist bureauc-
racy, the Soviet Union acted to constrain
the bloody American imperialist rulers.
Conversely, the destruction of the USSR
through capitalist counterrevolution in
1991-92 has made the world a much more
dangerous place. The war again'st Serbia,
the biggest war in Europe since World
War II, has brought us all a step closer
toward a World War III. Like the contin-
ued bombings of Iraq, it's all about exten-
sion of U.S. power, projecting its military
might not only against small, dependent
countries like Iraq and Serbia but against
America's main imperialist rivals, espe-
cially Gennany and Japan.
There's a weapon of a different kind in
the imperialists' arsenal, especially when
they try to promote capitalist counterrev-
olution. I'll refer you to our sign here:
"1950: Hail Chinese PLA in Tibet! 1979:
Hail Red Anny in Afghanistan!" That's
our position. We vehemently oppose
movements like the so-called "Free Tibet"
movement, which is simply a creature of
the American CIA, which financed, armed
and organized the 1959 uprising in Tibet
led by the Dalai Lama. This doesn't mean
we give Beijing an "A" for interethnic
harmony. Not by a long shot. The Beijing
bureaucracy, like all Stalinist regimes, is
nationalist and chauvinist. In China, that
means the chauvinism of the dominant
Han people, who make up 90 percent of
the population. A China run by workers
and peasants councils would defend the
rights of all national and ethnic minori-
ties. But as the current war against Serbia
all too starkly shows, when the imperial-
ists brandish "human rights," you better
watch your head. And in China, the U.S.
sponsors a whole range of reactionary
movements and so-called "human rights"
dissidents and "democrats" who are noth-
ing but tools of imperialism.
"Market Reforms": Road to
Counterrevolution
Increased U.S. belligerence toward
China is just one facet of American pol-
icy. The other is usually called "engage-
ment." These are not really counterposed
but complementary policies. They have
one goal: to overturn the 1949 Revolu-
tion. Now, the best spokesman for this
policy lately has been Henry Kissinger.
He's been on TV since the bombing
of the embassy, really frying to chill
things out. He's worried that the tensions
between the U.S. and China will upset
all the mechanisms by which American
imperialism is working to further capital-
ist restoration there.
Kissinger wrote an interesting piece in
the Washington Post (27 April) that kind
of gives you both sides of American pol-
icy. Contrasting China with the Soviet
Union, he said: "Beijing, which until
1978 was ideologically even more rigid
than Moscow, has since reversed its
course. Moving toward a market econ-
omy, it is, by classical Marxist standards,
hardly a communist country at all but an
...."
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, .)
WORKERS VANGUARD
authoritarian state with a governing party
that chooses to call itself communist." -
And he warns: "A Sino-American Cold
War would, in fact, produce a classic no-
win situation for both sides." Kissinger
was a trailblazer in the U.S.-China "rap-
prochement," going there in 1970 to cut a
deal with the Mao regime directed against
the Soviet Union. Kissinger wants to keep
the Chinese regime on a pro-Western.
course moving toward capitalist restora-
tion. And to that end, he is quite prepared
to brandish military threats: "A serious
American policy will hold China to that
undertaking. The American record in two
world wars, as well as in the Korean and
Gulf wars, should leave no doubt about
our seriousness in this regard."
Imperialist spokesmen like Kissinger
look to the Stalinist regime to carry out a
cold restoration of capitalism-and that's
precisely the program of the Stalinists
themselves. It's pretty clear that the pro-
tests outside the American embassy in
Beijing were orchestrated by the Chinese
government. In so doing, they tried to
present themselves as "anti-imperialist."
This is the most eJlormous hypocrisy.
When Chinese premier ~ h u Rongji came
Street Journal coming out and hailing
the premier of what used to be called
Red China and denouncing the American
president.
The Beijing bureaucracy right now
preaches that through free-market meas-
ures they can catapult China to become
the next century's first new superpower.
This is a utopian and reactionary notion.
A capitalist China would be an arena
of intense imperialist rivalry, with the
U.S., Japan and other imperialist powers
fighting for the spoils, for who would be
the main exploiter of that country. It is
worth remembering that the Pacific War
between the U.S. and Japan in World War
II was fought largely over which imperi-
alist power would control China.
A capitalist China would mean untold
misery for the vast working-class and
peasant masses. Already, the "iron rice
bowl" system of guaranteed jobs, hous-
ing and benefits has been shattered. With
state industries being privatized, every
year several million workers are being
thrown out of work, told to fend for
themselves in the growing private sector.
So side by side with yuppies making
money in Shanghai, Beijing and other
Burke/ute
Victorious People's Liberation Army enters Beijing, 1949. Mao Zedong's heirs
in Stalinist bureaucracy threaten destruction of remaining gains of the
Chinese Revolution.
to the United States in April, he didn't
make a peep of protest about U.S. aggres:
sion against Serbia, even though that's the
official Chinese position. He had more
important things on his mind: to strike a
deal with Clinton for China's entry into
the World Trade Organization. What that
would mean, and they're still working at
it, is throwing China's domestic market
wide open to foreign profiteers.
Clinton backed off from a deal with
Zhu, bowing to the anti-China lobby in
which the American anti-communist labor
bureaucracy is in the forefront. But busi-
ness leaders started screaming, because
they saw a lost opportunity to extend their
enormous inroads on the Chinese main-
land during the past 20 years. It was
really quite a spectacle. You had the Wall
28 MAY 1999
Cities, you have tens of millions of
unemployed workers. In the hinterland,
it's even grimmer. In 1997, a World Bank
study reported that most Chinese peas-
ants live on an income of about $1 per
day. With the return of private farming,
some 100 million or more people from
the countryside have flocked to cities
and towns looking for work.
Adding to that situation is the collapse
in trade with the capitalist countries of
Southeast Asia, because of the economic
crisis that still wracks that area. Those
taken with the myth of the free market
should look at what happened in coun-
tries like Indonesia in the last couple of
years. With the economic collapse there,
you have mass unemployment, starvation,
horrific interethnic bloodshed. And that's
Taiwanese-owned
electronics factory
in Guangdong
province, part of
massive capitalist
incursions in
China over last
two decades.
Peter Turnley
May 1989: Workers contingent arrives in Tiananmen Square. Entry of
proletariat into mass student protests heralded inCipient political revolution.
the kind of future facing the Chinese
masses if counterrevolution succeeds.
In his 1936 book The Revolution
Betrayed, which I encourage everybody
here to read, Leon Trotsky posed point-
blank: "Will the bureaucrat devour the
workers' state, or will the working class
clean up the bureaucrat? Thus stands the
question upon whose decision hangs the
fate of the Soviet Union." Trotsky's point
was confirmed in the negative in the
USSR, where after decades of Stalinist
misrule, capitalist counterrevolution tri-
umphed. This was a historic defeat for the
working class internationally. It threw the
working people of the former USSR back
to conditions of miserable poverty and
hopelessness. It has unleashed nationalist
bloodletting throughout the region.
China is much further down the road to
capitalist counterrevolution than was the
Soviet Union in Trotsky's time. But that
does not have to be the fate of the Chi-
nese masses. Last year, we published the
International Communist League's "Dec-
laration of Principles and Some Elements
of Program." We wrote: ''The essence
of 'market reforms' counterrevolution in
China is the bureaucracy seeking to
become partners in exploitation with cap-
italist forces and especially the Chinese
capitalists who were not destroyed as a
class (as were their Russian counterparts
after October 1917) but continued to
function in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singa-
pore and elsewhere." "This course," we
wrote, "cannot be accomplished without
breaking the resistance of the militant
working class."
And that's the critical question. Capi-
talist restoration in China would require
the consolidation of a new, counterrevo-
lutionary state apparatus, one that is
committed to defending private owner-
ship of the means of production. But the
force standing in the way of that happen-
ing is the Chinese working class. Today,
even Chinese government spokesmen
admit that strikes, sit-ins, marches and
other forms of labor protest have broken
Spartacist
(English Edition)
No. 53
Summer 1997
(56 pages)
$1.50
Make checks payable/mall to:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377 GPO
New York, NY 10116
out daily throughout the country. The
anger of the workers is captured in this
statement by a woman who lost her job
in a state-owned textile factory in Shang-
hai: "It's the laid-off workers who are
the poor ones, not the factory leaders-
their pockets are full." It's become com-
mon for protesting workers to carry signs
reading simply, "We want to eat." The
countryside is also wracked with unrest.
In January, thousands of peasants in
Hunan province demonstrated against
the corruption of government officials.
Hundreds of police were called out, kill-
ing one protester.
What is needed is the mobilization of
the proletariat-at the head of the poor
peasants, women and all the oppressed-
in a fight for political power to get rid of
the venal Stalinist bureaucracy. The
beginnings of just such a struggle were
seen with the entry of the working class
into the Tiananmen protests in May-June
1989. As was underscored by that incipi-
ent political revolution, for the proletar-
iat to successfully fight for political
power, it needs revolutionary leadership.
We seek to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist
vanguard party, recruited from the most
advanced workers and left-wing intellec-
tuals. To that end, we've translated our
documents like the ICL's "Declaration of
Principles" into Chinese.
Against both the nationalism fostered
by the Stalinist bureaucracy and illu-
sions in Western-style bourgeois democ-
racy, we stress the need for a proletarian-
internationalist perspective. As we wrote
in "China on the Brink" (Spartacist
[English-language edition] No. 53, Sum-
mer 1997): .
''To smash the threat of capitalist re-
enslavement and open the road to a
socialist future, Chinese workers must
look to the international class struggle. It
is by linking their fight for political rev-
olution with the struggle to smash capi-
talist rule from Indonesia and South
Korea to Japan and the U.S. that the Chi-
nese proletariat will form the bridge to
the socialist future."
[TO BE CONTINUED]
/SPARTACJSTr-: ~
~ 5 : I J:MftI .......... __ SUMMER 1.7
Original Documents Published from SOViet Archives
Trotsky's Fight Against Stalinist Betrayal
of Bolshevik Revolution
SEe PAGE 38
ReVOlutionary Regroupment or
Centrist Alchemy?
SEE PAGE II
-.....
"" ... ""'1'"
7
Opportunism ...
(continued from page 5)
IBT supporters Bob Mandel and Andrew
("Drew") Bonthius, organizers along with
Heyman of the LAC. Here we have the
truth of the matter: Heyman endorses the
call for a new trial while trying to conceal
this fact from longshoremen and the read-
ers of WV. Thus he and his centrist apol-
ogists are revealed as the most despicable
swindlers of the working class whose lies
only prove that they are not to be trusted.
Despite their long list of endorsements,
the only union contingent at the April 24
march was the small ILWU contingent.
Marching at the head with its "Free
Mumia" banner, this contingent was cyni-
cally conceived as camouflage for the
rally's real purpose. And the "Labor Con-
tingent" organized by the IBT-which or-
gani!-ed virtually no one other than them-
selves-was their fake-labor for
this bourgeois-liberal mobilization that ob-
scenely made Mumia a poster boy for the
inherent justice of capitalist "democracy."
Tacking the slogan "Free Mumia"onto
the call for a "new trial" is not warning
the workers about illusions of justice in
the capitalist courts, it is deceiving the
workers with such illusions in the service
of the Dt<mocratic Party. It is just a cover
for endorsing a demonstration organized
on the basis of deliberately opposing calls
to free Mumia and abolish the racist death
penalty, instead substituting the appeal
for a "new trial" in an expression of polit-
ical confidence in the capitalist courts.
April 24: Reformists Tail
Democratic Party
Heyman would haveILWU members
and other WV readers believe that the
rally's call for a "new trial" was simply
"one of its demands." In fact, it was the
central political focus of the demonstra-
tion. This was made clear in an Internet
"Report on the Emergency Leadership
Summit Meeting for the Mumia Move-
ment," held in New York City on January
23, whose participants included Mandel,
Solidarity's Steve Bloom and San Fran-
cisco Socialist Action leader Jeff Mack-
ler. A section of that report reads:
8
"During the day, there had been a run-
ning discussion over what the slogans for
Millions for Mumia should be. Some had
questioned why Free Mumia or End the
Death Penalty wasn't on the call. Clark.
[Kissinger, Refuse & Resist] had called
for uniting all those who had opposed an
execution. Both Robert Meeropol and
Charlene Mitchell had argued for the
importance of 'new trial.' Steve Bloom
from Solidarity suggested that the slogan
should be 'Justice for Mumia.' Pam
[Africa] said that her position as a mem-
ber of MOVE is that Mumia is innocent
and should be freed, but that we also
have to look strategically at how to unite
with many people. Some p,eople are not
yet prepared to say that Mumia is inno-
cent, but they will unite with a call that
says 'Stop the Execution, New Trial.' ....
"Another issue that Pam spoke to was'
whether opposition to the death penalty
should be a demand of the movement to
save Mumia. She said that while she and
MOVE were totally against the death
penalty and the International Concerned
Family & Friends is primarily anti-death
penalty, we cannot require the whole
movement to save Mumia to be anti-
death penalty."
Black History and the
Class No.3
Articles from Workers Vanguard
detailing the grotesque racist
bombing of Philly MOVE,
signature of the Reagan years.
$.75 (32 pages)
Order from/make checks payable to:
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Box 1377 GPO
New York, NY 10116
This was the program behind the April 24
mobilization and this is what Heyman,
the IBT and the IG are trying to conceal:
unity with people who think that Mumia
is guilty and who have no problem with
his being executed so long as he first gets
a "fair trial." This was made disgustingly
clear in a column called "What We Can
Do to Build the Struggle" accompanying
an article by Steve Bloom in Against
the Current (January/February 1999)
which appealed: "Demand a new trial for
Mumia Abu-Jamal and that no execution
take place until after a new trial is held"!
That this program was consciously
crafted in pursuit of a bloc with Demo-
cratic Party notables like Jesse Jackson
and, in the Bay Area, John Burton, Tom
Ammiano and San Francisco mayor Wil-
lie Brown-all endorsers of the demon-
stration-was again made crystal clear by
one of the chief organizers of the Philadel-
phia rally, the reformist Workers World
Party (WWP). In an interview in Workers
World (29 April), WWP leader Larry
Holmes, after acknowledging that Mumia
was framed up and that there should be
"no need" for a new trial, continued:
"Of course, not everyone shares these
revolutionary principles. And so we
solicit the support of those whose inter-
est in Mumia is based on opposition to
the death penalty or the recognition that
he simply didn't get a fair trial.
"It's very significant that many elected
officials in New York have spoken out
against the police massacre of Amadou
Diallo. This has been helpful in turning
the tide against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
who's infamous for his racist, police-
state strategy when it comes to dealing
with oppressed communities.
"Mumia's case is about police brutality.
But it's more difficult for elected offi-
cials and liberals to embrace. In Mumia's
case, a cop ended up dead. It takes more
courage, more resolute resistance to the
police, to rise to Mumia's defense."
There you have it in a nutshell. What all
this talk of "courage" really means is:
since we reformists' can't expect respect-
able liberal Democratic officeholders to
openly call for the freedom of a black
man convicted of killing a cop, to get
them to endorse our rallies and spare
them any test of their courage we will
simply sacrifice the fact of Mumia's inno-
WV Photos
San Francisco, April 24: Jack
Heyman (left) mouths not one iota
of criticism of Democratic Party or
"new trial" slogan. IG's Jan Norden
at rally, peddling centrist apologies
for Heyman and class collaboration.
cence and disappear any call to free him.
In New York, these Democratic Party
liberals tried to put themselves at the
front of the outrage over the Diallo kill-
ing in order to contain it and to preserve
the authority of the racist cops and "clean
up" their image. In San Francisco, Brown
was elected mayor with the support and
endorsement of the Police Officers Asso-
ciation, the local equivalent of the Frater-
nal Order of Police (EO.P.) which howls
for Jamal's execution. Democrat Bill
Clinton made a point of appearing along-
side Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the
cop whose killing was used by the Philly
police to frame up Jamal, at the June 1995
EO.P. gathering in Washington, D.C.-at
the very time when the governor of Penn-
sylvania was issuing a warrant for Jamal's
execution. And Clinton pushed through
the 1996 "Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act" vastly expanding the
legal domain of capital punishment and
gutting the right to federal habeas corpus
appeals, which has made it easier for the
state to kill Mumia.
Heyman (echoed by his IBT collabora-
tors) denounces us for "sectarian opposi-
tion" to the April 24 demonstration and
declares that "to not participate .. .is to
abstain from the class struggle at a criti-
cal time." In the mouths of opportunists,
"sectarian" is an epithet hurled at the
revolutionaries who uphold the Marxist
principles of the class struggle. April 24
was not class strug.gle but its opposite.
What Heyman really means is that we
did not endorse the program of class
collaboration on which the protest was
organized-i.e., we will 'not abandon
our Marxist principles and deliberately
deceive the working class by endorsing
the lie that the road to black freedom
and the emancipation of the proletariat
from capitalist exploitation lies through
support to the racist, capitalist Demo-
cratic Party. We are revolutionists, not
reformists. We seek to advance the con-
sciousness of the proletariat. Hitching the
ILWU work stoppage to the April 24
demonstration, as Heyman openly admits
he did, served to reinforce backward con-
sciousness-which is expressed chiefly
through political subordination to the
Democratic Party-on the most funda-
mental questions: the class independence
of the proletariat and the class nature of
the capitalist state.
Heyman dishonestly claims that sup-
port to the April 24 rally was based on
"implementing the united front slogan:
'March separately, strike together"'-i.e.,
organizing united working-class action
while explaining and warning against
the betrayals of the reformists. Heyman
marched not separately but in lockstep
with the reformist organizers on April 24.
In fact, he was one of the organizers and
a featured speaker. Yet Heyman uttered
not one single word of criticism of either
the call for a "new trial" or the Demo- '
cratic Party politicians who addressed the
crowd as he strutted around the speakers
platform. At a "Millions for Mumia"
press conference the week before, it was
Heyman who sycophantically proclaimed
San Francisco Labor Council head Wal-
ter Johnson-a pillar of the Demo-
cratic Party in the city and a staunch sup-
porter of Willie Brown's re-election as
mayor-"our secret weapon." It was
Heyman, the IBT and the rest of the LAC
who, at the March 6 "Millions for
Mumia" conference in Berkeley, led the
charge against our revolutionary criticism
precisely on the question of the call for a
"new trial."
Who "Minimized" IlWU
Action for Mumia?
Anyone reading Heyman, the IBT and
the IG would think the ILWU ranks had
been genuinely mobilized for a political
strike on Jamal's behalf. They all squawk
over our statement that:
"Despite the obvious efforts of the
ILWU bureaucrats to minimize the cost
to the company. to pull the thousands
of longshoremen coastwide off the job,
even if only for a few hours, would
be a powerful statement of the social
power that can and must be mobilized
in broader actions-from mass labor-
centered protest'!; to political strikes-for
Jamal's freedom."
The tremendous potential impact of
the longshore work stoppage was indeed
minimized in every way. It was con-
sciously organized to avoid violating the
contract. under which the ILWU bureau-
crats have for many years agreed to a no-
strike clause for the life of the contract.
The bureaucrats are politically dedicated
to playing by the bosses' rules-the
straitjacket of anti-labor laws that tie the
unions to the capitalist state-and the ex-
leftist Heyman provides the "militant"
cover. Here's how the San Francisco
Chronicle (24 April) reported the action:
''The longshore workers' protest isn't an
actual strike. Instead, the ILWU resched-
uled a regular monthly union meeting
provided for in its contract. Normally,
the ports stop work on a Thursday eve-
ning to accommodate the union meeting,
but this month. they will stop work
today.
"Port officials said the work stoppage
would have little effect on their busi-
ness. They said that shipping companies
had managed to schedule their arrivals
around the action."
And the San Francisco Examiner (20
April) reported that a spokesman for
the bosses' Pacific Maritime Association
(PMA) "said the protest was organized
about a month ago, giving the shipping
companies time to plan ahead."
More importantly, there was no real
attempt either before or at the union
meetings that day to politically mobilize
the membership in Jamal's behalf. At
the Local 10 hall that morning, several
of the lower seniority "B-men"-whose
second-class status denies them a vote in
their own union and who met separately
from the "A-men"-told WV salesmen as
they emerged from their meeting that
there was nothing said in the meeting
about the rally or Jamal's case, only that
they couldn't go to work. Far from the
"class-struggle action" he claimed,
man "organized" what was to a large
extent only a symbolic presence meant to
express labor's1ies to the Democratic
Party, a deception perpetrated first of all
on the longshoremen who want to defend
Mumia.
To facilitate this deception, Heyman
went after the PDC which for years has
publicized Jamal's case among ILWU
members and in the broader labor move-
ment. Heyman, the IBT and the IG all
scream bloody murder over our statement
that his whole purpose in asking the PDC
to hand over the names of union officials
who endorsed our previous efforts on
Jamal's behalf was to "go after the reds."
In its February 10 reply to Heyman, the
PDC wrote: "We cannot comply with
your request because the names of unions
and union officials that have supported
JaqIal's case (or any other case over the
many years of the PDC's existence) are
simply not ours to 'give' to anyone ....
Surely you must know that each endorse-
ment we have requested and received
is for a specific purpose and specific
WORKERS VANGUARD
slogans .... These endorsements are not
seen either by the PDC or by the union or
union official as a standing endorsement
for subsequent events and certainly not as
a blank check or part of a 'list' to be
passed around to any organization upon
request."
As shown by the long list of "labor
endorsements" pushed by the LAC, Hey-
man & Co. clearly didn't need the PDC
for names of union officials. Heyman's
request, made in the name of something
called "The Rank-and-File ILWU Com-
mittee to Defend Mumia Abu-Jamal,"
was never intended as anything other
than a club to bad-mouth the PDC as
"sectarian." (Les Friedman had earlier
made the same demand to the PDC on
behalf of the IBT's "Labor Action Com-
mittee.") And that's the only use to
which this phony request has ever been
put-first at the March 6 Berkeley con-
ference "labor workshop," where Hey-
man and his friends used it to slander the
PDC as an obstacle to Mumia's defense,
and in the current contributions by Hey-
man and his twin tails.
Heyman then tries to cause trouble
between the PDC and ILWU Interna-
tional president Brian McWilliams by
putting words in our mouths when he
challenges in his letter, "What is the name
of that leading bureaucrat? ILWU Inter-
national President Brian McWilliams."
No, his name is Jack Heyman. In our
eyes, Heyman is a lot worse than McWil-
liams, because he pretends to be some-
thing different, a left-talking friend of the
workers who is more radical than McWil-
liams. McWilliams makes no bones about
his politics. He is a Democrat and proud
of it. In this he is no worse than the rest
of the American labor bureaucracy, and-
when it comes to Mumia's defense-
better than many others who did not raise
their voices against Jamal's threatened
execution in 1995, as McWilliams did at
a PDC-initiated protest.
For his part, Heyman said nothing on
April 24 when McWilliams lauded the
ILWU's refusal to load scrap iron to
Japan in 1938-a chauvinist act of sup-
port for the U.S. bourgeoisie's mobiliza-
tion for interimperialist war over domi-
nation of the Pacific. On the contrary, in
building for April 24, Heyman repeat-
edly invoked the ILWU's "long history
of taking stands for social justice" and
the image of "progressive unionism" cul-
tivated by the ILWU leadership, expli-
citly harking back to the days of Harry
Bridges. What this means is talking "pro-
gressive" as you sell out the workers.
During World War II, Bridges, in line
with the politics of the Stalinist Commu-
nist Party (CP), enforced a no-strike
pledge as part of his ardent support for
U.S. imperialism-painting this imperi-
alist war for plunder .and profits as a
"war against fascism." The Stalinists also
opposed any struggle for black equality
during the war.
The "progressive" Bridges continued
his services to the capitalists and the
shipping companies in later years. He
imposed a no-strike clause in the ILWU
contract. He enforced speed-up through
the "Modernization and Mechanization"
contracts-which he called a "beautiful
piece of class collaboration"-that elim-
inated tens of thousands of jobs. He insti-
tutionalized the discriminatory division
between A-men and B-men, as well as the
obstacles that keep thousands of casuals
out of the union. This is the tradition Hey-
man embraces. We oppose the B-list cat-
egory, which ghettoizes a large segment
of the ILWU membership, and fight for
full union rights for all longshoremen.
Heyman did, too, when he was still ani-
mated by the Trotskyist program. But
now his loyalties lie elsewhere.
Heyman represents a type familiar in
the labor movement since the 1930s: the
ex-radical who, because of his own pessi-
mism regarding the revolutionary capac-
ity of the working class, abandons the
struggle fm workers revolution in favor
of a career in the pro-capitalist labor
He knows how to talk the
28 MAY 1999
talk and is thus very useful to the
bureaucracy in deceiving the workers.
Many in Local lO's heavily black mem-
bership identify with Jamal's cause and
want the union to take action in his
defense. As the house "leftist" in the
leadership of Local 10, Heyman makes it
his job to keep this impulse within
bounds acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
Heyman is well-practiced at this job.
When the ILWU leadership wants to do
something that will make it look good
to its members without violating the no-
strike clause or other legal restraints,
Heyman and his "leftist" buddies like
the IBT will come in and set up an "unof-
ficial picket line"-like with the Nep-
tune Jade in September 1997 in solidar-
ity with locked-out dockers in Liverpool,
England. Such stunts just reinforce the
line foisted on the workers by the pro-
capitalist bureaucracy that the union can't
break the law-Le., its no-strike commit-
ment to the bosses. The ILWU leader-
of "community organizing." One of our
last fights with ILWU Local 10 member
Howard Keylor, before he broke politi-
cally with the SL and became a supporter
of the External Tendency, was over his
association with racist Portland ILWU
officials who had for years kept blacks
out of their longshore local. This group
also denounced the SL for honoring the
victims of the 1985 government bombing
of the MOVE home in Phihide1phia.
Now the IBT's missive comes right out
and argues that Mumia can get justice
from the capitalist courts, stating that "it
is not impossible that a new trial could
result in an acquittal." They denounce the
statement by a spokesman for the Labor
Black League quoted in our article that a
new trial is "going to be exactly the same
frame-up bullshit that happened the first
time." Why then is the PDC's Rachel
Wolken stein involved in Mumia's legal
defense, they demand. Because while the
IBT treated Mumia and MOVE as pari-
IBT. In 1984, Keylor, then on the Local
10 exec board, helped the bureaucrats
scuttle a union boycott of the Nedlloyd
Kimberley, a ship carrying South African
cargo, which had been called in solidar-
ity with embattled black workers fight-
ing the hated apartheid regime. As editor
of Workers Vanguard, Norden edited
an article on that betrayal headlined:
"ILWU Anti-Apartheid Action Sabotaged
-Labor Traitors and Their Lacl).eys"
(WV No. 374, 8 March 1985). Last year,
the IG raised a criticism of the Neptune
Jade "picket" similar to ours. But now
Norden hails this as a "legitimate action
of labor solidarity" as he cynically rallies
to defend Heyman's "honor" against the
SL, praising this labor opportunist for
having the "gumption to speak out"
against us on Brazil.
WV Photo
August 1995 labor-centered Oakland protest for Mumia Abu-Jamal initiated
by poe was part of international campaign which stayed Jamal's execution.
Marxists look to social power of integrated labor movement, not to capitalist
"justice" system.
In Heyman, Norden sees a kindred
spirit. Norden and his clot broke with
us when we moved to break fraternal
relations with a group in Brazil which
proved to be more interested in holding
onto union office in a cop-riddled union
than in building the revolutionary party.
Why shouldn't the IG alibi appeals by
trade-union opportunists to the justice
of the capitalist courts? The IG has spent
much of the last three years trying
to cover up for the fact that this Brazil-
ian group which is now its affiliate, the
Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil
(LQB), has dragged the SFPMVR munic-
ipal workers union in Volta Redonda
through the capitalist courts three times
as part of a squalid fight for control of the
union against an equally unprincipled
bureaucratic faction. Norden's group has
never answered our challenge to publish
the documentation of these court suits
(court case numbers 30.831, 30.832,
30.833).
Brazil is far enough away that Norden
can deny anything because no one except
us will take the trouble to go there to
prove him a liar, as we have done (see
"Lies, Damned Lies and Anti-Union
Lawsuits: IG's Brazil Fraud Exposed"
and "IG's Brazil Cover-up: Dirty Hands,
Cynical Lies," WV Nos. 669 and 671, 30
May and 11 July 1997). But now he has
shown his true colors here by making
common cause against the revolutionary
Spartacist League and the PDC with this
labor bureaucrat in leftist clothing, Jack
Heyman, who uses the ILWU to further
his career as a deceiver of the workers.
ship's refusal to mobilize union power to
picket out the Neptune Jade emboldened
the PMA bosses, who responded with a
sinister witchhunt aimed at the union and
its officers (see "Bay Area Longshore
Union Under Attack-Defend Supporters
of Liverpool Dockers!" [WV No. 681, 2
January 1998]).
A Short S.yphilitic Chain
While Heyman openly supports the
pro-Democratic Party labor bureaucracy
and endorses the call for a "new trial," the
IBT and IG cover for Heyman-not a
very long edition of what Trotsky referred
to as the "syphilitic chain" in which cen-
trists and reformists are key links in tying
the working class to the racist, capitalist
prder. The IBT says it "prefers" the call
to free Mumia"":"-as though it were simply
a matter of echoing Hey-
man's denunciation of our "sectarian oppo-
sition" to the "new trial" mobilizations.
Norden, in his typically slimy manner,
portrays the ILWU work stoppage as inde-
pendent from the April 24 demonstration
by simply "disappearing" the demonstra-
tion in the pages of his Internationalist.
But Norden certainly knew of the demon-
stration: in San Francisco, he marched
shoulder to shoulder with Heyman in this
mobilization for capitalist though
he didn't bother to sell the International-
ist at the longshore stop-work meetings
which he claimed we denigrated.
For years, the IBT refused to get any-
where near Mumia's case, taking it up only
when the international campaign which
stayed Jamal's execution in 1995 made
Mumia's cause popular among the refor-
mists and liberals. The IBT's hostility to
the fight against black oppression was
evident from this group's inception in
the early 1980s. After the SL initiated a
5,OOO-strong labor/black mobilization that
stopped a KKK march in Washington, D.C.
in November 1982, the IBT's forerunner,
the External Tendency, sneered that our
- black-centered proletarian perspective was
a retreat from "the working class" in favor
ahs, the PDC has fought to pull every
legal lever to win his freedom, while
stressing-in the words of International
Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon
-that we place "all faith in the power of
the masses and no faith whatever in the
justice of the courts." Even Jamal's legal
papers call for his immediate freedom!
When the handful of SL cadre who
formed the IG split from our organiza-
tion in 1996, they protested indignantly
when we called them "the IBT of the
Nineties." Yet here they are now joining
the IBT in their groveling suPport to
Heyman's treacherous role. The IBT and
the IG play the classic role of centrists:
directing all their fire against the left in
order to alibi the right. As Trotsky put it
in his 1934 article "Centrism and the
Fourth International": "A centrist always
remains in spiritual dependence on right-
ist groupings and is inclined to cringe
before those who are more moderate, to
remain silent on their opportunist sins
and to coverup their actions before the
workers." .
The kind of maneuvering practiced
by Heyman to prevent mobilizing union
power has long been the preserve of the
Through our propaganda and our labor-
centered united-front mobilizations, our
class-struggle defense work aims to bring
to the proletariat the necessary conscious-
ness of the nature of the capitalist state
and of the centrality of the fight for black
freedom to socialist revolution in this
country. We aim to break illusions in the
Democrats and bring home the under-
standing that the working people need
their own class party, a revolutionary
workers party. What Heyman and his
"left" lawyers do is reinforce the obsta-
cles to mobilizing the social power of
the working class on Jamal's behalf, and
in every cause of the exploited and
oppressed. Their road serves the capi-
talist masters; ours the fight for a
socialist future._
Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League
0$10/22 issues of Workers Vanguard 0 New 0 Renewal
(includes English-language Spartacist and Black History and the Class Struggle)
international rates: $25/22 issues-Airmail $10/22 issues-Seamail
o $2/6 introductory issues of Workers Vanguard (includes English-language Spartacist)
o $2/4 issues of Espartaco (en espanol) (includes Spanish-language Spartacist)
Name ____________________________________________________ _
Address __________________________________________________ _
Apt. # __ Phone ( __ ) _____ _
City State Zip ------=-c
714
Make checks payable/mall to: Spartaclst Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116
9
Serbia ...
(continued from page 1)
by 90 percent, the NATO bombing threat-
ens to plunge the Serbian population
into epidemics of dysentery and other
diseases. Last week, NATO warplanes
bombed a prison in Kosovo, which they
lyingly claimed was serving as an army
barracks, killing 19 people. The previ-
ous day, U.S. bombers hit a Belgrade hos-
pital, killing four As rescue work-
ers carried wounded women from the
maternity ward, one remarked bitterly:
"This is of course a military target if you
just take the longer view. In 20 years or
so, these babies will be soldiers."
For all the boasting about "precision
bombing," NATO bombs last week dam-
aged the official residences of the am-
bassadors to Belgrade from Sweden,
Switzerland, India and several other
countries, as well as the Libyan and
Israeli embassies. A few days later, war-
planes blasted a base ofthe Kosovo Lib-
eration Army auxiliaries of the NATO
imperialist forces.
The U.S.INATO bombing of Serbia is
no "humanitarian" mission to defend the
Albanians of Kosovo, as the imperialists
cynically claim. The U.S. rulers are wag-
ing a war of aggression against a tiny
country to project their military power in
the Balkans while maintaining Wash-
ington's position as top dog against its
imperialist rivals. We seek the defeat of
U.S. imperialism through the revolution-
ary mobilization of the American work-
ing class. We stand for military defense
of Serbia against U.S.INATO attack
and demand the withdrawal of all imperi-
alist troops from the Balkans. At the
same time, we give no political support
to the bloody regime of nationalist Ser-
bian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, and
we fight for a socialist federation of the
Balkans through proletarian revolutions
throughout the region.
As the bombing enters its third month,
the New York Times (21 May) reports
that NATO leaders "feel they have to have
a military breakthrough or a diplomatic
breakthrough. Everyone is tired of this."
Divisions within the capitalist ruling class
in this country and among the NATO
powers have become increasingly open.
In Washington, the House voted early this
month that Clinton must seek Congres-
sional approval before sending ground
troops into Kosovo and, on a tie vote,
rejected a resolution supporting the air
strikes against Serbia. At the same time,
Democratic Party liberals in particular are
increasingly calling to prepare an inva-
sion of Kosovo. A recent editorial in the
LO Fete ...
(continued from page 3)
That's why those looking for a genuine
Trotskyist party were interested in the
ICL at the LO fete. Immediately prior to
LO's despicable thuggery, an Italian ICL
comrade urged tete participants to sup-
port the campaign of material aid to the
workers of the Zastava car plant and other
factories bombed by imperialism, a cam-
paign which was initiated by Italian syn-
dicalists. Many participants welcomed
the opportunity to concretely express
their opposition to their own bourgeoisie
and their solidarity with the victims of the
U.S.INATO bombing. The last thing
NATO wants to see is a revolutionary
class struggle by Yugoslav workers
against the capitalist butcher Milosevic
(indeed the Zastava workers have a his-
tory of militant strikes). That, and our
proletarian internationalist fight for a
socialist federation of the Balkans to put
an end to the ethnic bloodletting which
capitalist counterrevolution has wrought,
are things the imperialists seek to impede.
LO howled with the imperialist wolves
against the Soviet degenerated workers
state and cheered the forces of capitalist
counterrevolution across East Europe,
which set the stage for the all-sided com-
munalist bloodletting and imperialist war
10
Times (20 May) declared that "if the
negotiations falter or fail, NATO should
have other options available," and con-
cluded that "preparations for an invasion
should move ahead."
As British Labour prime minister Tony
Blair campaigned aggressively for send-
ing ground troops into Kosovo, German
Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard
SchrOder declared that "sending in
ground troops is unthinkable. This is
our position and it won't change in the
future." SchrOder was reportedly furious
that, as a result ofthe U.S. bombing of the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade, his trip to
Beijing as new chairman of the European
Union became an occasion for apologies.
Earlier this month, a conference of
SchrOder's coalition partners, the Greens,
narrowly rejected a motion calling for an
unconditional end to the bombings,
which would have forced them to quit the
government. Greece and Italy have defied
Washington by calling for a pause in the
bombing. Meanwhile, Russia and China
insist on a halt to the bombing as a pre-
condition for any UN Security Council
vote on an imperialist "peace" deal.
Tensions among the NATO partners
have also flared over the question of who
would lead an occupation force. Ger-
many and France had earlier pushed for
occupation under the banner of the
United Nations or the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE), a European-dominated alliance,
as a way of undercutting U.S. influence
in the region. The Clinton administration
responded by angrily insisting that any
military force in Kosovo must be under
NATO command. When UN secretary
in the Balkans today. Still riding the coat-
tails of its own bourgeoisie, now LO tries
to silence the ICL's revolutionary opposi-
tion to the war and to the capitalist gov-
ernments waging the war.
We will not be silenced by LO's
goons. The entire workers movement and
especially LO members themselves must
protest this outrage. At bottom, this vio-
lence is a desperate attempt to shield LO
members from open political debate and
a clash of views which is vital to politi-
cally clarify differences within the work-
ers movement. Every year, LO's goons
create a new scandal which reveals the
disgusting values of these French social-
chauvinists. In 1992, the homophobic
LO chauvinists denied ACT-UP a stand.
For offering our stand to ACT-UP, the
ICL has been forever banned from hav-
ing a stand of our own at the J-,O fete. In
recent years, LO's goons have repeatedly
beaten up second-generation youth of
North African origin and immigrants
who sought admission to the fete. Last
year, LO censored the Basque nationalist
organization Herri Batasuna. The ICL
has exposed and protested each and
every one of these atrocities. Don't wait
to find out who will be next on LO's hit
list. Act now! Stop LO's political gang-
sterism and thuggery! We urge all work-
ers organizations to publicly condemn
this cowardly and despicable violence!.
Join the March on the Pentagon
Gather at lila VieInam Votarana Memorial. Woshlngtoo. DC
.JUNE 5 12 NOON
Money 101' Jobs & Educallon
-not WAR
1.\S.oWA1Q .... _ ... --- .... - .. ""',.,...."' ....

___ ..._.CM.. ..... _ ... __
... ,........-.""'--' ,...... ......... _ .... _ ... ...-.-... __ ..
... _. __ .JUm) 1000_ us.-._ ...... _ ..... _
_onI ........... -. .. _ ... _._ ........ _
..... _____ .... _"NJ" .... _
..... "'-... _"' .. _ .... __ ............ -,.
--.-......... _-... ---.-.-....
....., ...... -.................. ...
_......... ".-.........

_1Ioo-.", ..-._o!I.
=.. :==-__ '-_ == __ l'II
Serbian chauvinist banners
at New York "antiwar" rally
organized by Workers
World. WWP promotes
Serbian nationalism while
appealing to imperialist
rulers for more "humane"
pOlicies.
general Kofi Annan appointed two spe-
cial envoys to participate in negotiations
with Belgrade, he was curtly told by U.S.
officials that an occupation force in
Kosovo will "under no circumstances"
be under UN control and that the UN
should '!be content with its own business,
that is, humanitarian questions" (Le
Monde, 9 May).
Two political advertisements in the
West Coast edition of the New York
Times (13 May) bracket the cunent
spread of bourgeois opinion on the impe-
rialist bombardment of Serbia. One
signed by the "Balkan Action Council"
proclaims that "Only Ground Troops Will
End Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo" and
calls for the "establishment of a NATO-
safeguarded international protectorate for
Kosovo." Its signatories range from sin-
ister right-wing types like former
national security adviser Zbigniew Brze-
zinski to liberal writer Susan Sontag and
rad-chic celeb Bianca Jagger.
The other, titled "10 Reasons to Stop
Bombing Yugoslavia," was placed by the
"California Peace Action Education
Fund," which is composed of the Quak-
ers, the social-democratic Los Angeles
Committee of Correspondence and other
radical-liberal pacifist types who want a
kinder, more gentle imperialism. Com-
plaining about a "double standard," they
ask: "Why are we not taking action to
stop Turkey's violent repression" of
Kurds. Presumably, they favor a single
"standard" for imperialist terror bomb-
ing. They also complain about the money
being "wasted" on missiles and bombs
instead of being spent on ','humanitarian
relief efforts." Echoing the European
social democrats, they urge Clinton to
"work towards the immediate deploy-
ment of non-military peacekeepers"
through the OSCE or the UN.
Both these ads start from the stand-
point of what is best for U.S. imperialism.
This is also the terrain of fake-left groups
in this country like the International
Socialist Organization (ISO) and the
Workers World Party (WWP). Like the
rad-lib ad cited above, one of the main
reasons the ISO offers for a bombing halt
is that it has strengthened Milosevic
instead of weakening him. The ISO joins
the rad-Iibs in deploring U.S. "hypocrisy"
for not acting against ethnic or commu-
nalist massacres in Rwanda, Turkey, etc.
The pages of both Workers World and the
ISO's Socialist Worker are full of plain-
tive calls on the capitalist rulers, such as
"Stop the Bombing" and spend "Money
for Jobs & Education-Not War."
As Marxists, we understand that impe-
rialism is not a policy that can be
"reformed" by pressuring a wing of the
ruling class. It is a worldwide system of
exploitation and oppression-capitalism
in its highest stage of development-
which must be overthrown through inter-
national socialist revolution.
ISO/WWP: Left Face of
American Liberal Imperialism
Behind the U.S. bourgeoisie's dread of
getting into a "quagmire" in the Balkans
is the "Vietnam syndrome," the ever-
present memory of its humiliating defeat
by the revolutionary struggle of the Viet-
namese workers and peasants in the
1960s and early '70s. In parallel fashion,
the fake left in this country calls for "No
More Vietnams" and harks back to the
peace crawls of that period, which were
politically dominated by the craven ref-
ormists of the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP).
While tens of thousands repeatedly
marched against the Vietnam War in
Washington, D.C. and other cities, the
SWP kept the demonstrations limited to
pressure on Democratic Party liberals
with "single-issue" slogans like "Out
Now!" That demand was an undisguised
appeal to imperialist "doves," exemplified
by Democratic Senator Vance Hartke,
who sat on the steering committee of the
SWP-dominated National Peace Action
Coalition (NPAC). A wing of the capital-
ist ruling class increasingly realized
that, especially after the Sino-Soviet split
and the 1965 crushing of the Indonesian
Communist Party, an anti-Communist
restabilization of Southeast Asia was pos-
sible without pursuing the losing Vietnam
adventure.
The Spartacists alone fought for a pro-
gram aimed at mobilizing the working
class in struggle against the U.S. capital-
ist rulers. We called for the military vic-
tory of the Vietnamese National Libera-
tion Front while at the same time warning
against the nationalist policies of the
Stalinist bureaucracy in Hanoi. Our reso-
lute class solidarity with the Vietnamese
workers and peasants and our calls for
working-class action-including political
strikes-in the U.S. against the war pro-
vided the objective bases for uniting rad-
ical students, trade unionists and the
black population around opposition to
U.S. imperialism.
We politically opposed the petty-
bourgeois "draft resistance" movement
by socially privileged college students.
We maintained that, if drafted, antiwar
activists should go into the army, to
explain to their fellow soldiers that they
were being forced to fight and perhaps
die in a racist imperialist war and to
organize opposition among working-
class youth within the military against
the capitalist rulers. Toward the end of
the war, U.S. troops in Vietnam were in
fact becoming semi-mutinous.
In the unions, among antiwar activists,
on the campuses, among soldiers, the
small forces of the Spartacist League
fought for the principled program of class
struggle which, if it had become rooted in
the working masses, wnuld have given
powerful assistance to the Vietnamese
Revolution and laid the basis for creating
a revolutionary workers party in this
country.
Groups like the ISO and WWP today
aim to build a new version of NPAC by
appealing to liberal bourgeois sentiment.
But the imperialists today are not, as they
were in the '60s in Vietnam, engaged in a
losing war to crush a social revolution. In
fact, the liberals are today the chief war
hawks. Consequently, much of the left
not only refuses to call for the defense of
Serbia and the defeat of the U.S.INATO
imperialists, but even downplays the call
for withdrawal of U.S.INATO troops
from the Balkans, Lenin described as
"social-chauvinism" just such support to
the imperialist aims of the capitalist rul-
ing class under a smokescreen of "social-
ist" phrasemongering.
When the Cliffite Socialist Worker
printed a rare call last month for NATO
to "get out of the Balkans," we wrote:
"What they really mean is that the UN
'international forces' should "eplace the
U.S.-led NATO forces" (WV No. 712, 30
April). And that is exactly what they
meant. Alex Callinicos, a leading spokes-
man for the British Socialist Workers
Party, the ISO's patron, recently joined
Noam Chomsky and other liberal aca-
demics in signing a statement in the New
Statesman (10 May) which declares:
"Nato is not the only or above all the
best fulcrum for an agreement. One
could find the eJemen,ts of a multi-
national police force (embracing nota-
WORKERS VANGUARD
bly Serbs and Albanians) in the ranks
of the OSCE to enforce a transitional
agreement."
This is an open call for military interven-
tion under the auspices of the OSCE,
reflecting the particular interests of the
West European imperialist powers.
Meanwhile, the WWP has issued a
calI for a June 5 "Stop Bombing Yugo-
slavia" demonstration in Washington,
D.C. that doesn't even mention the word
imperialism. WWP even chose as its
starting point for the march the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, the bourgeoisie's
monument to its dirty, counterrevolution-
ary war! The featured speaker will be
none other than Ramsey Clark, who was
attorney general for Democratic presi-
dent Lyndon Johnson as his administra-
tion rained down napalm on the Viet-
namese people. As head of the Justice
Department, Clark was the boss of J.
Edgar Hoover's FBI as it was carrying
out its murderous COINTELPRO opera-
tion against black radicals.
Logically, the ISO and WWP should
find themselves on opposite sides of the
war in Kosovo. WWP walIows in Serb
chauvinism; its "antiwar" protests fea-
ture Serbian monarchist flags and chants
of "Kosovo is Serbia." The ISO, although
it has retreated from its patently pro-
imperialist call of "independence for Ko-
sovo," still Milosevic as the
greatest evil in the Balkans and echoes
NATO war propaganda over the plight of
the Kosovo Albanians. Yet the WWP and
the ISO share a common policy of pres-
suring U.S. imperialism, as seen in their
amicable coexistence at a May 19 anti-
war "teach-in" at the New School in New
York City. After an ISO spea\<.er there
claimed to "condemn" those on the left
who "parrot" the ruling class, a Spartacist
League member shot back from the floor:
"WiII you condemn the British Socialist
Workers Party which called for a vote for
the Labour Party, that was 'over the
moon' when Tony Blair was elected
prime minister of Britain? And finally,
wiII the ISO condemn the parroting of
the imperialists that has been the hall-
mark of the International Socialist
Organization and the Socialist Workers
Party, which sided with imperialism for
the 50 years of the anti-Soviet Cold War
drive that has resulted in counterrevolu-
tion in the former Soviet Union and in
Eastern Europe, which has created this
nationalist bloodletting?"
Workers Power: Lawyers for
NATO's Albanian Pawns
Our principled Marxist opposition to
U.S.INATO imperialism in the Balkans
NYC Labor ...
(continued from page 12)
and enhance their credibility. Thus,
Rivera and black Democrat Al Sharpton
were key architects of a I program
for "police reform" which includes the
demand for a pay raise for the cops. Sup-
porting better pay and "working condi-
tions" for the police-echoing the PBA's
demand for "No More Zeros" in the next
contract- simply emboldens these thugs.
The political character of the May 12
ralIy was made amply clear by the refor-
mist Communist Party (CP), which
waxed ecstatic that it was a continuation
of the "alI-people's fight to defeat Sen.
Alfonse D' Amato and elect Chuck Schu-
mer," an aggressively pro-cop "law and
order" Democrat (People's Weekly World,
8 May). The CP has been pushing the
Democrats as "friends of labor" for more
than six decades. But the Democrats are
no less a party of capitalism and racism
than the Republicans. Former NYC
mayor David Dinkins laid off thousands
of city workers while putting more cops
on the streets. And Clinton has presided
over the devastation of welfare, a vast
expansion of the death penalty and one
after another imperialist military inter-
vention overseas. Demonstrating their
craven fealty to the bloody capitalist
order, not one of the labor tops at the May
12 ralIy uttered a peep of criticism of
28 MAY 1999
has been the subject of a polemic by the
centrist Australian Workers Power (WP)
group-affiliated to the British group of
the same name-in a pamphlet titled War
in the Balkans. WP is a classic example
of what we have called "NATO social-
ists." They formalIy claim to oppose
NATO and defend Serbia-"though not
in Kosova which they have no right to
WV Photo
Spartacist League fights to forge
revolutionary workers party. Anti-
imperialism abroad means class
struggle at home I
occupy," according to a British WP state-
ment distributed at a March 30 London
meeting. But their support to the separa-
tist Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK),
which is simply a pawn of NATO, is
nothing but support to the imperialists'
war aims in the Balkans.
The Australian WP pamphlet cites our
statement in "Balkans Trip Wire" (WV
No. 7lD, 2 April) that as early as 1976-
when Yugoslavia and Albania were still
. deformed workers states-we had de-
fended the national rights of the Albanian
people of Kosovo and Macedonia to
secede and join Albania. WP says: "And
yet today, when ethnic hatreds and
nationalism are an even greater threat to
proletarian unity in the Balkans, the Spar-
tacists will have no truck with this princi-
ple." It is revealing that the pamphlet
never cites what we say about this in our
article, namely: "With direct U.S.INATO
intervention on the side of the Kosovo
Albanians in recent months, the question
of national self-determination has be-
Clinton's imperialist war against Serbia.
The social"democratic International
Socialist Organization (ISO) enthused
over the May 12 demonstration. Its
Socialist Worker (21 May) article had not
a'word about the presence of Democratic
Party pols or the cops. This is no surprise.
The ISO supports "organizing" prison
guards and backs "rank-and-file" outfits
like Teamsters for a Democratic Union
and the DC 37 "Committee for Real
Change," whose stock in trade is dragging
the unions into the bosses courts. Mean-
while, the ISO tails the police whitewash
efforts of SharptonlRivera by pushing a
"Citywide Network Against Police Vio-
lence" with its own "lD-point program"
whose main difference is that it does not
call for more pay for the cops.
The police cannot be reformed; they
must be swept away through a socialist
revolution which smashes the capitalist
state and installs a workers to
expropriate the bourgeoisie and place the
means of production in the hands of the
working class. The Spartacist League
fights to break workers and minorities
from the Democratic Party in order to
build the revolutionary workers party
needed to lead the proletariat to the sei-
zure of state power. Working people
create the wealth on which the Wall Street
moguls gorge. Only when those who
labor rule will that wealth be used to pro-
vide decent jobs, housing, education and
medical care for aIL_
come subordinated to the defense of Ser-
bia against imperialist attack."
Our position toward Kosovo today is
analogous to that of Lenin's Bolsheviks
toward self-determination for Poland
during the First World War. The right of
Poland and other oppressed nations to
secede from the Russian tsarist empire
had been a central element of the Bol-
shevik program. However, with the out-
break of the war in 1914, the Polish left
petty-bourgeois nationalist Josef Pilsud-
ski organized military units which fought
with the Austrian army against Russia
under the banner of restoring "Polish
independence." In the context of interim-
perialist war, Lenin rightly argued that
calIs for Poland's independence only
served as a "democratic" cover for Ger-
man imperialism.
The Workers Power pamphlet asserts
in complete seriousness that "under the
pressure of opposing imperialist aggres-
sion the Spartacist League have aban-
doned the Kosovars to their fate." WP
certainly hasn't given in to the "pres-
sure" of opposing imperialism!
The UCK, continues the pamphlet, "is
not yet reduced to merely 'an instrument
of NATO' ." This is self-evident hogwash.
UCK leaders have repeatedly bragged to
Western journalists that they are serving
in Kosovo as spotters, guiding U.SINATO
warplanes to their targets. Dozens of Brit-
ish and American special forces are fight-
ing alongside the smalI UCK forces. And
the UCK recently named as its leader a
former brigadier general in the Croatian
army who helped plan-with the support
and colIusion of Washington-the 1995
"ethnic cleansing" of Serbs in the Krajina
region.
WP is welI aware that the UCK is
today an instrument of NATO. A few
weeks ago they co-sponsored a "Peace
in the Balkans Committee" meeting in
London which featured a Kosovar Alba-
nian spokesman who vociferously pro-
claimed that "we" support NATO becaUSe
they are the only ones helping the Alba-
nians. Serbia is the only imperialism I
see, she declared to the assembled "anti-
imperialists," and if this is contrary to
your beliefs, please stay home.
WP's support to the UCK goes to the .
heart of its centrist politics, which are
defined by tailism toward the Labourite
social democrats who are today the most
rabid war hawks in Europe. In every con-
flict between opposing petty-bourgeois
or bourgeois nationalist forces, Workers
Power always searches for a so-calIed
\. <.
"progressive" side-for example, sup-
porting the imperialist-backed Bosnian
Muslim forces in the three-sided com-
munalist fratricide between Croats, Mus-
lims and Serbs in Bosnia. At bottom,
WP's methodology is social-democratic,
based not on the historic class interests
of the proletariat but on "classless" con-
siderations (which camp is more or less
"democratic" or "genocidal," which best
embodies a mythical "anti-imperialist
dynamic," etc.). This was prepared and
exemplified by years of support to
social-democratic anti-Sovietism. .
While nominally abandoning its erst-
while Cliffite "third camp" anti-Soviet
line, during the Cold War of the 1980s
WP joined with the Cliffites in support-
ing such reactionary anti-Communist
forces as Solidarnosc in Poland, a move-
ment of rabid nationalists and anti-
Semites masquerading as a trade union.
And in 1991-92, they cheered on the
"democratic" counterrevolution led by
Boris Yeltsin and supported by Washing-
ton which destroyed the Soviet degener-
ated workers state.
For all the "ethnic cleansing" of Alba-
nians that Milosevic has carried out in
Kosovo, he could never dream of equal-
ing the horrors the American ruling class
has inflicted on the world-from the
bloody rape of the Philippines a century
ago to the mass slaughter of Haitians in
1915, from the A-bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to the devastation that was
wreaked on Vietnam and North Korea in
Washington's counterrevolutionary wars
to "roll back Communism," from the gen-
ocidal massacre of workers and peasants
in Central America in the 1980s to the
ongoing murder and starvation of welI
over a million Iraqis. And, as the current
trial of the New York City cops who hid-
eously tortured Haitian immigrant Abner
Louima testifies, this is the same ruling
class that wages a racist war-the so-
calIed "war on crime"-against blacks
and other minorities in this country.
The capitalist system, based on the
exploitation of the mass of the world's
population for the benefit of a handful of
filthy rich, necessarily breeds poverty,
racism and war. The imperialists' tug-of-
war over influence in the Balkans con-
tains the germ of a future world war in
which all sides will be armed with
nuclear weapons. We seek to build revo-
lutionary workers parties as part of a
reforged Fourth International to lead the
socialist revolutions which alone can put
an end to this inhuman system .
Forums __ --,
For a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!
.'.}1,U@3'*.
For more information: (213) 380-8239
Saturday, June 5, 4 p.m. Echo Park United Methodist Church
1226 N. Alvarado St. (Two blocks north of Sunset)
Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste Forum
TORONTO
For more information: (416) 593-4138
Saturday, June 5, 7:30 p.m. International Student Centre
33 St. George St. (North of College St.)
TORONTO NEW YORK
Saturday, June 12, 7:30 p.m.
Trinity-St. Paul's Centre
427 BloorSt. West (1 blk. w. of Spadina Stn.)
For more information: (416) 593-4138
Thursday, June 10, 7:30 p.m.
322 W. 48th St., Club Room
(bet. 8th & 9th Aves., take E or C to 50th St.)
For more information: (212) 267-1025
11
WfJ/lllE/IS """,/11)
NYC Labor Rally:
Angry Ranks, Sellout, Bureaucrats
NEW YORK-On May 12, up to 50,000
members of New York City trade unions
flooded the streets of downtown Manhat-
tan in the biggest labor demonstration
seen here in decades. The turnout was
fueled by anger over years of wage
freezes imposed on municipal workers,
over union-busting "workfare" which has
meant slashing over 20,000 city jobs and
forcing desperate welfare recipients to
do the work, over rampant cop terror
exemplified by the recent death-squad-
style execution of black African Amadou
Diallo. But the union bureaucrats organ-
ized this rally not as a display of labor's
social power against the city rulers but as
a political mobilization for the capitalist
Democratic Party.
The ciass-collaborationist aims of the
union tops were reflected not only in
the presence of numerous Democratic
Party mayoral hopefuls on the speaker's
platform but in the invitation to the police
"unions" to be an official part of this
labor rally. This was a slap in the face to
every unionist who has seen the business
end of a billy club while picketing, and
especially to the black and Hispanic
workers who make up the bulk of the
municipal unions' membership and know
that anyone of them could have been in
Amadou Diallo's shoes when he was
gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets. Espe-
cially coming amid the trial of the five
cops who brutalized Haitian immigrant
Abner Louima two years ago, the labor
tops' embrace of the police as "union
brothers" is aimed at deflecting outrage
over cop terror. While Patrolmen's Benev-
olent Association (PBA) chief James Sav-
age was presented as part of the "team,"
groups of protesters jeered when he
spoke. "I know his team. His team are
killers," yelled one Teamsters member.
Welcoming the capitalist rulers' hired
thugs into this demonstration was an
obscene display of the union misleaders'
class loyalties. For years, tl,tey have been
in the hip pocket of Republican mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, positively bragging.at
the rally how they had shoved through a
wage freeze, not to mention massive job
cuts, "workfare" and other attacks on liv-
ing standards and union conditions. Wil-
lie James, head of Transport Workers
Union Local 100, whose 35,000 mem-
bers keep the city running, imposed a
"workfare" provision in the union con-
Cops, Courts Out of the Unions!
Gribbon/Chief-Leader Erwitt/NY Daily News
Racist, strikebreaking cops were invited by labor tops to join May 12 rally, where police manhandled union protesters.
tract. Virtually every major union official
in New York supported Giuliani's re-
election in 1997; even Service Employ-
ees (SEIU) Local 1199 head' Dennis
Rivera, a former leader of the state Dem-
ocratic Party machine, remained for-
mally "neutral" in the election while
appearing alongside Giuliani at a press
conference. With Wall Street booming
and thanks to the sellout contracts
enforced by the union tops, the city and
state governments are rolling in a $5 bil-
lion surplus. But when the bureaucrats,
with contract talks coming up, asked for
"A Fair Share for Working Families"
after years of enforcing "sacrifice," Giu-
liani told them to drop dead.
In the last year, a spate of government
anti-union "corruption" investigations
has led to the ouster of a layer of Giuliani
allies from the NYC labor officialdom.
SEIU Local 32B-32J janitors' head Gus
Bevona, AFSCME District Council 37
Local 1199 chief
Dennis Rivera
(far left) jQins with
Hillary Clinton in
election rally for
Democratic
Senatorial candidate
Charles Schumer
last year.
chief Stanley Hill and school cafeteria
workers' union president Charles Hughes
were plenty crooked-and arch-sellouts
-but the aim of government intervention
is not to "clean up" the unions but to
weaken them and-place them even more
firmly under the thumb of the capitalist
state. We say: Labor must clean its own
house! Government hands 'off the unions!
Cops out of the labor movement!
Now with the despised Giuliani's term
in City Hall coming to an end, the labor
tops are out to refurbish their image, and
the pro-Democratic Party wing of the
NYC labor bureaucracy is intent on reas-
serting the whip hand. The chief organ-
izers of the May 12 rally were Rivera,
the AFSCME International bureaucracy
which has taken control of DC 37 and
the teachers union; in fact, it was United
Federation of Teachers president Randi
Weingarten who was instrumental in
bringing the cops in.
There was a palpable divide at the
rally between predominantly minority
unions like DC 37 and Local 1199 hos-
pital workers, who mobilized heavily,
and the largely white skilled trades. Even
before the demonstration, representatives
of the building trades unions like current
Central Labor Council chief Brian
McLaughlin argued against any explicit
criticism of Giuliani and Republican
governor George Pataki. But Giuliani's
police-state methods-attacking every-
one from cab drivers to sidewalk hot
dog vendors-have infuriated even many
white New Yorkers, especially when
cops started confiscating the cars of driv-
ers who have had as little as one drink.
Even as cop spokesmen addressed the
rally, the police engaged in repeated prov-
ocations against union members, penning
them in and sealing off entire streets to
pedestrians, including those trying to join
the demonstration. When the cops waded
into the crowd at the corner of Warren and
Broadway, shoving and manhandling pro-
testers, the labor bureaucrats' cozy unity
with the police "unions" was almost shat-
tered amid outrage by minority and white
workers alike. As workers shoved back,
shouting "Union! Union!" in the face of
the police, it brought to mind the 40,000-
strong construction workers march last
year which erupted in running battles
between trade unionists and retreating
cops. The cops are not, workers but an
integral part of the capitalist state appara-
tus which exists to repress the working
class. The role of the police "unions" is
to further their bonapartist appetites
against any constraints on their murder-
ous terror. How this plays out was seen in
the violent, racist cop riot against former
mayor David Dinkins in 1992, which cat-
apulted Giuliani into City Hall.
Rivera and other liberal union officials
marched at the head of an April 15 protest
against police brutality in the wake of
the Diallo killing. There is no contradic-
tion here with their joining with the cop
"unions" on May 12. As we warned
throughout the wave' of Diallo protests,
the role of the Democratic Party liber-
als and their labor bureaucrat allies
was to place themselves at the head of
the outrage in order to deflect it into
schemes to "clean up" the cops' image
continued on page 11
B.reak>withth.e .. Democrats!' Fora .. Class-StruggleWork e.rs Party!
12 28 MAY 1999